If your cat is a hungry little guy who will eat whatever you put in front of them, you know the importance of portion control. Sure, chonky cats are cute, but obese cats are three times more likely to pass compared to lean cats. Going to the vet is expensive, so an automatic pet feeder is a worthwhile investment in your cat’s life and the length of your budget. This PETLIBRO feeder deal is part of Amazon’s Pet Day Deals—happening today and tomorrow online.

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This automatic pet feeder allows you to schedule up to 60 meals a day and 50 portions per meal. If your kitty deserves a little snack you can also hit the manual feeding button to give them their much-deserved extra portion. A rotor, secure twist-lock lid, desiccant bag, and sealing strip all ensure freshness and crunchy bites all the time. You can also record a 10-second message and play it while you’re away to calm your pet. And, built-in infrared detection suspends feeder operations to keep your cat safe and your feeder in great condition.

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Sperm whales have their own unique cultures, accents, and potentially a phonetic alphabet. A team from MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) may have decoded this phonetic alphabet that reveals sophisticated structures within sperm whale communication that could be similar to human phonetics and other animal linguistic systems. 

“Sperm whale calls are, in principle, capable of expressing a wider space of meanings than we previously thought!” MIT computer science graduate student Pratyusha Sharma tells PopSci. Sharma is a co-author of a new study published May 7 in the journal Nature Communications that describes these findings. 

Sperm whale ABCs

With some of the largest brains of any species on Earth, sperm whales have complex social behaviors. They travel in pods and have various cultural groups that dive and hunt together and even take turns looking after younger whales. They do this all in almost complete darkness, so they need strong communication to coordinate their lives in the ocean’s deepest depths.

[Related: Science Says Sperm Whales Could Really Wreck Ships.]

Sperm whales use a complex system of codas–short bursts of clicks–to communicate. In this study, the team collected 9,000 codas from sperm whale families in the Eastern Caribbean sperm observed by The Dominica Sperm Whale Project. They used acoustic biologging tags, called D-tags that were deployed on whales. The D-tags captured details of the whales’ vocal patterns. 

The team found that these short groups of clicks vary in structure depending on the conversational context. With this data in hand, they used a mix of algorithms for pattern recognition and classification, and on-body recording equipment. It revealed that the communications were not random or simple, but more structured and complex. 

The sperm whale’s essentially have their own phonetic alphabet. Various auditory elements that the team call rhythm, tempo, rubato, and ornamentation work together to form a large array of distinguishable codas. Depending on the context of the conversation, the whales can systematically modulate certain aspects of their codas. They may smoothly vary the duration of the calls–rubato–or add in some extra ornamental clicks. The team also found that the building blocks of these codas could be combined in various ways. The whales can then build many distinct vocalizations from these combinations. 

“The sperm whale communication system is a combinatorial coding system,” says Sharma. “Looking at a wider communicative context allowed us to discover that there is fine-grained variation in the structure of the calls of sperm whales that are both perceived and imitated in the course of their exchange.”

Using AI

The team developed new visualization and data analysis techniques that found individual sperm whales could emit various coda patterns in long exchanges. Using machine learning is important for pinpointing the specifics of their communications and predicting what they may say next. 

[Related: How bomb detectors discovered a hidden pod of singing blue whales.]

Scientists are interested in determining if these signals vary depending on the ecological context they are given in and how much the signals follow any potential rules similar to grammar that the listeners recognize. 

“The problem is particularly challenging in the case of marine mammals, because scientists usually cannot see their subjects or identify in complete detail the context of communication,” University of Pennsylvania Psychology Professor Emeritus Robert Seyfarth said in a statement. “Nonetheless, this paper offers new, tantalizing details of call combinations and the rules that underlie them in sperm whales.” Seyfarth was not involved in this study.

Alien communication on Earth

In future studies, CETI hopes to figure out whether elements like rhythm, tempo, ornamentation, and rubato carry specific intentions when communicated. This could provide insight into a specific linguistic phenomenon where simple elements are combined to present complex meanings. This “duality of patterning” was previously thought to be unique to human language. 

Research like this also parallels hypothetical scenarios in which humans contact alien species and need to communicate. 

“It’s about understanding a species with a completely different environment and communication protocols, where their interactions are distinctly different from human norms,” says Sharma. “Essentially, our work could lay the groundwork for deciphering how an ‘alien civilization’ might communicate, providing insights into creating algorithms or systems to understand entirely unfamiliar forms of communication.”

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It’s baby Peregrine falcon season on a California island best known for its swift currents, cold water, and notorious prisoners. A new live webcam allows viewers to watch four recently hatched peregrine falcon chicks on Alcatraz Island. The camera was set up by the National Park Service (NPS) and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. The fixed-angle webcam provides high-definition images even at night. The livestream is also equipped with a 12-hour cache so that visitors can catch-up on allowing viewers to catch up.

The nest is the handiwork of a female falcon named Larry, short for Lawrencium. Larry hatched on the University of California, Berkeley’s bell tower in 2018. To track Larry’s progress in the wild, biologists placed a band on her leg when she was a chick. By 2020, Larry and her unnamed male partner were spotted breeding on Alcatraz Island. They were tucked away with their young in a natural cave called an eyrie on the western side of the island. According to the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, this was the first time that Peregrines had ever been recorded nesting on Alcatraz. The duo welcomed four chicks in April 2023, matching their four for this year. 

Biologists say that the goal of the livestream is to “share this incredible view of a wild peregrine falcon nest with the world.”

“I hope this livestream generates appreciation for Peregrine falcons and sparks viewers’ interest in the other bird life found on Alcatraz as well,” Alcatraz Island biologist Lidia D’Amico said in a statement.

[Related: Thriving baby California condor is a ray of hope for the unique species.]

While best known for its now-closed prison, Alcatraz Island has been a sanctuary for birds for years.  It’s home to loud Western Gulls, large Black-crowned Night-Herons, speedy Anna’s Hummingbirds, and more. According to the NPS, Peregrine falcons like Larry are the apex predators of the island who can be seen preying on other avians, including songbirds, shorebirds, ducks. This behavior is an important reminder that the falcons are wild animals. Parts of the popular island are closed from the months of February to September to allow for nesting and protecting the birds.

Peregrine falcons are the largest falcons in North America, with an impressive 39 to 43-inch wingspan. They are known for their spectacular dives called stoops. Urban-dwelling Peregrines fly high above their intended prey–usually pigeons–before they stoop and strike the bird in mid-air. This sharp blow is fatal and scientists estimate diving Peregrine falcons can reach speeds of over 200 miles per hour.  

[Related: Sadly, these live-streamed bald eagle eggs likely won’t hatch.]

Despite being such fearsome predators, their populations nationwide were once driven to the brink of extinction. They were federally listed as endangered in 1973. Organic pollutants, particularly the synthetic insecticide DDT, severely thinned their egg shells. DDT was banned in 1972 and Peregrine falcons were officially removed from the endangered species list in 1999.

“This impressive bird has long been noted for its speed, grace, and aerial skills,” the National Park Service says. “Now, it is also a symbol of America’s recovering threatened and endangered species.”

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Nothing prepares you for mating like a seafood buffet. Well, at least if you’re a sea lion.

A massive school of anchovy in the San Francisco Bay has lured approximately 1,700 sea lions to Pier 39 near the city’s Fisherman’s Wharf district. Not since the early 1990s has the area seen this many sea lions, Sheila Candor, Harbormaster at Pier 39, told the Associated Press. In recent decades, less than a thousand sea lions flopped onto the pier each spring.

Pier 39 is a sea lion rest stop of sorts, a place to fill up on anchovies and herring before heading south to the Channel Islands for mating season. The pier docks use three times the floatation support as normal docks to support the weight of the blubbery sea beasts.

If you’re planning to visit this year’s herd of sea lions, prepare for a chorus of loud barking and frequent displays of sun-basked lounging and fin-slap bickering. And if you can’t make it to San Francisco, enjoy these photos we collected.

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Despite the reputation for being the trash pandas of the bird world, seagulls are kind of the masters of evolution. They can survive and thrive alongside humans, have a remarkable memory, and some have been observed using pieces of food to bait fish the way primates use tools. The seagull species that have bigger brains that are also more likely to nest on coastal cliffs may also be better adapted to breed in urban environments. 

A study published April 25 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution found that more than half of cliff-nesting gull species that also nest in cities and towns have bigger brains. Species such as the Herring Gull, the Lesser Black-backed Gull, and the Black-legged Kittiwake potentially have a behavioral flexibility that allows them to nest in more challenging locations like rooftops.

“Many people will be familiar with gulls nesting and foraging in urban areas,” Madeleine Goumas, study co-author and a postdoctoral researcher specializing in herring gulls at the University of Exeter in England, said in a statement. “It’s not something you might expect from a seabird, so we wanted to try to understand why they do it.”

[Related: Seagulls hunger for food touched by human hands.]

In the study, the team combed through various research databases to find records of urban breeding and foraging among gulls and data on brain size by species. They then mapped a range of the different species present. 

Out of 50 gull species, 13 were recorded as using urban areas to breed, while 13 were recorded using urban areas to forage for food. Nine species bred and fed in more building-heavy environments. 

When they compared the figures for breeding with the birds’ known habits and brain size, they found that 10 out of the 19 cliff-nesting gull species (53 percent) also nested in urban areas. Only three out of 28 (11 percent) of generally non-cliff-nesting species nested in both spaces. 

[Related: The birds of summer patrolling Ocean City’s boardwalk.]

“We found that gull species with larger brains are more likely to be cliff-nesters, and cliff-nesting species are more likely to breed in urban areas,” study co-author and University of Exeter evolutionary biologist Neeltje Boogert said in a statement. “We also found that cliff-nesting is probably not something that was shared by the ancestor of gulls, so it is a relatively recent adaptation.”

They also point out that this is not a fixed or instinctive behavior in most gulls. The non-cliff-nesting gull species nest exclusively on the ground, most most traditionally cliff-nesting species can nest in both spaces. 

“This suggests that bigger brains enable these gull species to be flexible with regard to where they choose to nest, and this allows them to use unconventional sites, like buildings, for raising their young,” said Goumas.

[Related: Piping plovers are in trouble, but there’s some good news.]

In terms of foraging, the researchers found that neither brain size nor the shape of their wing were good indicators of seagull behavior in urban environments. The team also looked at the status of the gulls on the International Union on Conservation of Nature’s Red List. The gulls with stable or increasing populations were more than twice as likely to be observed using urban habitats than the species that are decreasing. Of the 10 Threatened or Near Threatened species, only the Black-legged Kittiwake was known to use urban spaces.

Observing how gull species function in populated areas with humans and buildings is important for conservation. Seeing what factors allow some to survive and thrive while others do not can inform why some aren’t faring as well. 

“Urbanization is a major problem for a lot of animals,” said Goumas. “It looks like some gull species have managed to overcome some of the challenges that prevent other animals from using urban areas, but we need more long-term studies as well as comparative studies on other taxa to fully understand the impacts of urban living.”

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Parrots, renowned for their impressive intelligence and charming vocal mimicry, have gained popularity as pets in recent decades. Those same traits that make the birds fascinating to observe, however, can also cause issues. A lack of socialization and proper stimulation can cause parrots to act out, or in some cases, even harm themselves. An estimated 40% of cockatoos and African Greys, two popular species of parrots, reportedly engage in potentially harmful feather destruction. Many of these stress-induced, destructive behaviors are a byproduct of parrots living in environments drastically different from their natural habitats where they fly free among fellow birds. New research suggests modern technology, specially Facebook Messenger video chats, could help these birds regain their social lives

“In the wild, they live in flocks and socialize with each other constantly,” University of Glasgow associate professor Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas said in a statement. “As pets, they’re often kept on their own, which can cause them to develop negative behaviors like excessive pacing or feather-plucking.”

Researchers from Northeastern University, MIT, and the University of Glasgow recently set out to see how several species of parrots interacted when placed on brief video calls with one another. Over the course of three months, the researchers trained 18 parrots and their human caretakers to learn how to operate touchscreen tablets and smartphones. The birds were initially trained to associate video calls with a bell. Everytime the bell was rung during the training phase, the bird would receive a treat. Caretakers, meanwhile, were trained to end calls any time the bird showed signs of stress or discomfort. Once trained, the birds were free to ring the bell on their own accord. Doing so would result in their caretakers opening up Facebook Messenger and connecting them with fellow birds around the country involved in the study.  associated video calls with a bell and fed the birds a treat every time they rang the bell. The parrots were then able to access Facebook Messenger to video call fellow birds around the country. 

The results were shocking. In almost all cases, the birds’ caretakers claim the video calls improved their well-being. Some of the birds even appeared to learn new skills, like foraging or improved flight, after observing other birds doing so. Two of the birds, a cockatoo named Ellie and an African Grey named Cookie, still call each other nearly a year later. 

“It really speaks to how cognitively complex these birds are and how much ability they have to express themselves,” Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas said in a statement. “It was really beautiful, those two birds, for me.”

Bird video-calls resulted in long-lasting friendships 

The research into the birds was split up into two phases. For the first 10 weeks, caregivers were instructed on how to introduce and train the birds to interact with the touchscreen devices. Though previous research has explored using touchscreen with cats, dogs, bears, and rodents, parrots are particularly well suited to using the devices thanks to their combination of high cognitive ability, impressive vision, and flexible tongues. Once trained on the devices, all of the birds involved took part in a “meet and greet” where they were briefly placed in video calls with each bird at least twice. The birds were trained using treats to ring a bell to signal their interest in hopping on a call.

Stage two of the research removed the treats to see if the birds would still have any interest in requesting a video call without a food reward. Every one of the birds continued to ring the bell, with some doing so many times. Once rung, researchers presented the birds with a tablet home screen featuring photographs of different birds in the study. The parrot would then use its tongue to click on the companion it wished to interact with. Once presented with a bird on the other side of the call, the parrots would hop towards the screen, let out loud squawks, and bob their heads. Researchers believe the vocalizations in particular may mirror the type of calls and responses parrots often engage in when they are in the wild. 

Researchers observed multiple instances of birds appearing to mimic each other’s behaviors. Some would begin grooming themselves after watching a bird on the other end of screen do so. Other times, the birds would “sing” in unison. In one video, a colorful parrot can be seen eagerly waiting for a call to connect. A large white bird eventually appears on the other end of the call, which results in the red bird banging its head and chirping in excitement. In another case, a male macaw video-calling with a fellow macaw would let out the phrase “Hi! Come here!” If the second bird left the screen, the vocalizing bird would quickly ring a bell, which the caretakers interpreted as the bird asking his friend to return to the screen.                   

“Some strong social dynamics started appearing,” Northeastern assistant professor Rébecca Kleinberger said in a statement. 

Parrots prefer calling real birds over pre-recorded video

Interestingly, parrots included in the study appeared substantially less interested in video calls if they featured pre-recorded video of other birds. A related study published by University of Glasgow researchers show the parrots strongly preferred to chat with other parrots in real time. Over the course of six months of observation, the parrots spent more time engaged in the calls with real birds than with the pre-recorded videos. Those findings suggest the birds weren’t merely being existed by the presence of a screen. Rather, the actual communication with another living bird plays an important role. 

Combined, the birds in the study spent 561 minutes in love calls with other birds compared to just 142 minutes interacting with the pre-recorded videos. The birds’ caregivers reinforced that point and told researchers they appeared more curious and engaged when a live bird was on the other end of the call. 

“The appearance of ‘liveness’ really did seem to make a difference to the parrots’ engagement with their screens,” Douglas recently wrote. “Their behavior while interacting with another live bird often reflected behaviors they would engage in with other parrots in real life, which wasn’t the case in the pre-recorded sessions.”

Researchers are hopeful these findings could one day be used to help parrots improve their socialization. And while some of the parrot caretakers surveyed noted the steep learning curve to train the parrots, every one of them said the project was worthwhile once concluded. An overwhelming 71.4% of the caretakers in the video calling study said their birds had a very positive experience. By contrast, none of them described the experience as negative. One caretaker in particular claimed her pet “came alive during the calls.” 

“We’re not saying you can make them [the parrots] as happy as they would be in the wild,” Kleinberger said. “We’re trying to serve those who are already [in captivity].”

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Animals have evolved all sorts of weird and wonderful methods of communication—everything from mantis shrimp bouncing pulses of polarized light to one another to birds-of-paradise gallivanting around the jungle to demonstrate their virility. Even so, there may well only be one animal that can claim to have a highly developed variety of expression that’s communicated entirely via a blob of fat on its forehead. Step forward—or, perhaps, swim forward—the beluga. 

Like all other toothed whales, these little Arctic-dwelling cetaceans have an organ on their foreheads that’s referred to as the melon. The melon has long been a source of fascination to scientists, who’ve proposed a variety of outlandish theories over the years to explain its presence. (The consensus today is that it’s used for sound generation and to assist in echolocation.)

In the beluga, however, the melon also seems to have another use. Belugas’ melons are strikingly large and, uniquely, they are also malleable, because belugas have facial muscles that can pull and push on the melon. Doing this essentially allows the animal to change the shape of its head. But  why do belugas do this? 

As ScienceNews reports, a March Animal Cognition study of four captive belugas in a Connecticut aquarium set out to categorize the different shapes the melon can take, and then trying to deduce those shapes’ meanings. The study’s authors analyzed a year’s worth of video footage of the belugas, and then compared their findings to observations of another, larger population of 51 belugas at an aquarium in Canada.

They found that while the melon can take any number of subtly different shapes, these all fall into five distinct categories—and they suggest that these shapes essentially constitute a form of visual communication unique to belugas.

It is commonly known that the motivation behind many of a given animal’s actions come down to feeding and/or mating. And unsurprisingly, at least two of the melon shapes seem related to the latter—or as the study authors put it, they are “primarily performed by males toward a female recipient in conjunction with courtship behavior.” (These shapes also occur during what the authors call “male-male sociosexual play,” a behavior that occurs in various cetaceans. One  study of killer whales describes it as “young males … practic[ing] courtship behaviors by engaging in sociosexual play with other males”; in this context “sociosexual” refers to behavior that is sexual but does not involve conception.) The three remaining shapes are harder to parse, although one common thread is that all are carried out more often by males: “Males performed shapes more than three times as frequently… as females.” 

There are important caveats here: studies of melon-based communication have so far been limited to belugas in captivity, and it’s certainly not out of the question that an intelligent, highly sociable animal might communicate differently in an aquarium than in the wild. The study also suggests that more research is needed into the interaction between the melon’s echolocatory and visual functions, not least because the video footage used for analysis lacked audio: “[Shapes] could serve both functions, [and] the lack of acoustic recordings during this study precludes these determinations… Simultaneous acoustic recordings and video observations in all lighting conditions are needed to resolve this question for the function of beluga melon shapes.” 

Nevertheless, the study goes some way toward explaining one of the animal kingdom’s most unusual behaviors.

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Observers have documented multiple animal species using plants for self-medicinal purposes, such as great apes eating plants that treat parasitic infections or rubbing vegetation on sore muscles. But a wild orangutan recently displayed something never observed before—he treated his own open wound by activating a plant’s medical properties using his own spit. As detailed in a study published May 2 in Scientific Reports, evolutionary biologists believe the behavior could point toward a common ancestor shared with humans.

The discovery occurred within a protected Indonesian rainforest at the Suaq Balimbing research site. This region, currently home to roughly 150 critically endangered Sumatran orangutans, is utilized by an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior to monitor the apes’ behavior and wellbeing. During their daily observations, cognitive and evolutionary biologists noticed a sizable injury on the face of one of the local males named Rakus. Such wounds are unsurprising among the primates, since they frequently spar with one another—but then Rakus did something three days later that the team didn’t expect.

After picking leaves off of a native plant known as an Akar Kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria), well-known for its anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, and antioxidant properties, as well as its use in traditional malaria medicines, Rakus began to chew the plant into a paste. He then rubbed it directly on his facial injury for several minutes before covering it entirely with the mixture. Over the next few days, researchers noted the self-applied natural bandage kept the wound from showing signs of infection or exacerbation. Within five days, the injury scabbed over before healing entirely.

Such striking behavior raises a number of questions, particularly how Rakus first learned to treat his face using the plant. According to study senior author Caroline Schuppli, one possibility is that it simply comes down to “individual innovation.”

“Orangutans at [Suaq] rarely eat the plant,” she said in an announcement. “However, individuals may accidentally touch their wounds while feeding on this plant and thus unintentionally apply the plant’s juice to their wounds. As Fibraurea tinctoria has potent analgesic effects, individuals may feel an immediate pain release, causing them to repeat the behavior several times.”

[Related: Gorillas like to scramble their brains by spinning around really fast.]

If this were the case, it could be that Rakus is one of the few orangutans to have discovered the benefits of Fibraurea tinctoria. At the same time, adult orangutan males never live where they were born—they migrate sizable distances either during or after puberty to establish new homes. So it’s also possible Rakus may have learned this behavior from his relatives, but given observers don’t know where he is originally from, it’s difficult to follow up on that theory just yet.

Still, Schuppli says other “active wound treatment” methods have been noted in other African and Asian great apes, even when they aren’t used to disinfect or help heal an open wound. Knowing that, “it is possible that there exists a common underlying mechanism for the recognition and application of substances with medical or functional properties to wounds and that our last common ancestor already showed similar forms of ointment behavior.”

Given how much humans already have in common with their great ape relatives, it’s easy to see how this could be a likely explanation. But regardless of how Rakus knew how to utilize the medicinal plant, if he ever ends up scrapping with another male orangutan again, he’ll at least know how to fix himself up afterwards.

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This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine.

Shrubbery, toolsheds, basements—these are places one might expect to find spiders. But what about the beach? Or in a stream? Some spiders make their homes near or, more rarely, in water: tucking into the base of kelp stalks, spinning watertight cocoons in ponds or lakes, hiding under pebbles at the seaside or creek bank.

“Spiders are surprisingly adaptable, which is one of the reasons they can inhabit this environment,” says Ximena Nelson, a behavioral biologist at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Finding aquatic or semiaquatic spiders is difficult work, Nelson says: She and a student have spent four years chasing a jumping spider known as Marpissa marina around the pebbly seaside beaches it likes, but too often, as soon as they manage to find one it disappears again under rocks. And sadly, some aquatic spiders may disappear altogether before they come to scientists’ attention, as their watery habitats shrivel due to climate change and other human activities.

What scientists do know is that dozens of described spider species spend at least some of their time in or near the water, and more are almost surely awaiting discovery, says Sarah Crews, an arachnologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. It also appears that spiders evolved aquatic preferences on several distinct occasions during the history of this arthropod order. Crews and colleagues surveyed spiders and reported in 2019 that 21 taxonomic families include semiaquatic species, suggesting that the evolutionary event occurred multiple independent times. Only a swashbuckling few—not even 0.3 percent of described spider species—are seashore spiders; many more have been found near fresh water, says Nelson.

It’s not clear what would induce successful land-dwelling critters to move to watery habitats. Spiders, as a group, probably evolved about 400 million years ago from chunkier creatures that had recently left the water. These arthropods lacked the skinny waist sported by modern spiders. Presumably, the spiders that later returned to a life aquatic were strongly drawn by something to eat there, or driven by unsafe conditions on land, says Geerat Vermeij, a paleobiologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis—because water would have presented major survival challenges.

“Since they depend on air so much, they are severely limited in whether they can do anything at all when they are submerged, other than just toughing it out,” says Vermeij. Newly aquatic spiders would have had to compete with predators better adapted to watery conditions, such as crustaceans, with competition particularly fierce in the oceans, Vermeij says. And if water floods a spider’s air circulation system, it will die, so adaptations were obviously needed.

But spiders as a group already possess several water-friendly features, suggests Crews. They have waxy, water-repellent exteriors, often covered in hairs that conveniently trap air bubbles. Even having eight legs is helpful, says Nelson: Spiders can distribute their weight nicely while they skitter across a water surface, or use their octet of appendages to row along.

Some spiders take their aquatic adaptations to the next level, though. Consider the diving bell spider, Argyroneta aquatica, an overachieving arachnid that is the only one known to do it all under water: breathe, hunt, dine on insects and their larvae, and make spiderlings. Found in fresh water in Europe and parts of Asia, it spins a silken underwater canopy and brings air bubbles from the surface to its submerged home via its body hairs. When it goes out, it carries a smaller air bubble, like a little scuba tank, on its back.

Seashore spiders face particularly daunting conditions, says Nelson, who coauthored an article about adaptations of marine spiders for the 2024 Annual Review of Entomology. “There’s a splash zone,” she says. “It’s kind of a wild environment.” A spider might be baking in hot sun one minute, drenched in chilly saltwater the next. Some spiders migrate up and down their beaches with the tides; Nelson speculates that they might monitor lunar cycles to anticipate when to move.

Other seashore spiders spin watertight nests where they hide out for hours while the tide is in. M. marina, for example, seeks seashells with nice, concave spaces in which to spin safe tents. Another spider, Desis marina, hides in holdfasts where bull kelp attaches to rocks, lining the holdfast’s interior with silk to create an air-filled pocket and staying submerged for as long as 19 days. D. marina emerges only when the tide is going out, to hunt for invertebrates like shrimp.

A spider that’s even occasionally submerged in saltwater or eating briny seafood will also have to maintain proper internal salt levels. “Presumably, they will be able to concentrate the salt somehow and then poo it out,” Nelson says. Scientists don’t know how marine spiders pull this off. And at least one intertidal-zone spider, Desis formidabilis of South Africa’s cape, comfortably maintains an interior salt concentration much like the crustaceans it eats, according to a 1984 study. (Freshwater species also probably require adaptations because their insides must stay saltier than their surroundings or food, Vermeij speculates.)

When a spider hides out with a limited air supply for days or weeks at a time, oxygen levels also may become a critical issue. Intriguingly, researchers have identified gene variants within the oxygen-guzzling, energy-making mitochondria of aquatic spiders that may help them cope with low-oxygen environments. These changes mirror beneficial changes to mitochondrial genes in birds that live in high-altitude, low-oxygen environments.

In another study, researchers investigated the genes used in the silk glands of aquatic and land spiders. They found that water-spider silk seems to have a high proportion of the water-repelling amino acid pair glycine and valine—which might also be an adaptation, they suggest.

Creeping extinction

But all the adaptations in the world might not be enough to save some water spiders. Nelson’s M. marina, for example, seems to be very particular about the beaches it occupies. The pebbles must be just right, not too big or small. If sea level rise inundates M. marina’s beaches, it’s possible the spiders will have nowhere else to go, Nelson says. “So those spiders will be lost.”

Marco Isaia, an arachnologist at the University of Turin, Italy, investigated the wetland habitats of the diving bell spider and the fen raft spider, Dolomedes plantarius. As wetlands continue to disappear, the habitats available to each species will contract by more than 25 percent over a decade, and their ideal ranges will move northward, Isaia and colleagues predicted in a 2022 study. It would be difficult for the spiders to cross dry land for new wetlands, and north European winters might prove too cold anyway. “The loss and degradation of wetland habitats is expected to have serious impacts on their survival,” says Isaia, “and an increase in their extinction risk.”

Given these risks, some aquatic spiders might go the way of the dodo before science gets a handle on them. “I suspect in every rocky bed of beach or river, there are probably spiders that we just don’t know exist there,” says Nelson. “Because they’re hiding.”

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

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Boston Dynamics may have relocated the bipedal Atlas to a nice farm upstate, but the company continues to let everyone know its four-legged line of Spot robots have a lot of life left in them. And after years of obvious dog-bot comparisons, Spot’s makers finally went ahead and commissioned a full cartoon canine getup for its latest video showcase. Sparkles is here and like its fellow Boston Dynamics family, it’s perfectly capable of cutting a rug.

Unlike, say, a mini Spot programmed to aid disaster zone search-and-rescue efforts or explore difficult-to-reach areas in nuclear reactors, Sparkles appears designed purely to offer viewers some levity. According to Boston Dynamics, the shimmering, blue, Muppet-like covering is a “custom costume designed just for Spot to explore the intersections of robotics, art, and entertainment” in honor of International Dance Day. In the brief clip, Sparkles can be seen performing a routine alongside a more standardized mini Spot, sans any extra attire.

But Spot bots such as this duo aren’t always programmed to dance for humanity’s applause—their intricate movements highlight the complex software built to take advantage of the machine’s overall maneuverability, balance, and precision. In this case, Sparkles and its partner were trained using Choreographer, a dance-dedicated system made available by Boston Dynamics with entertainment and media industry customers in mind.

[Related: RIP Atlas, the world’s beefiest humanoid robot.]

With Choreographer, Spot owners don’t need a degree in robotics or engineering to get their machines to move in rhythm. Instead, they are able to select from “high-level instruction” options instead of needing to key in specific joint angle and torque parameters. Even if one of Boston Dynamics robots running Choreographer can’t quite pull off a user’s routine, it is coded to approximate the request as best as possible.

“If asked to do something physically impossible, or if faced with an environmental challenge like a slippery floor, Spot will find the possible motion most similar to what was requested and do that instead—analogously to what a human dancer would do,” the company explains.

Choreographer is behind some of Boston Dynamics’ most popular demo showcases, including those BTS dance-off and the “Uptown Funk” videos. It’s nice to see the robots’ moves are consistently improving—but maybe nice still is that it’s at least one more time people don’t need to think about a gun-toting dog bot. Or even what’s in store for humanity after that two-legged successor to Atlas finally hits the market.

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The saber-toothed cats that once prowled modern day California had more distinct dental features than even their sabers would suggest. Some of the complete skulls had a tooth socket occupied by two teeth–a permanent saber tooth and a baby tooth that would eventually fall out. These double-toothed sockets may have helped stabilize their signature front fangs and keep them from breaking off. The findings are described in a study published April 8 in the journal The Anatomical Record. 

Sharp, but easily lost teeth

The study looked at saber-toothed cat fossils found in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. There are at least five separate lineages of saber-toothed animals that have evolved around the world. The species Smilodon fatalis roamed widely across North America and into Central America, before going extinct about 10,000 years ago.

Paleontologists studying these fossils have been stumped by why the adult animals with two canines that are more like thin-bladed knives avoided breaking them. During periods of food scarcity, saber-toothed cats broke their teeth more often than they did during times of plenty, potentially due to altered feeding strategies and eating rocks. Paleontologists also still do not know how saber-toothed animals hunted prey without completely breaking these unwieldy teeth. 

In an earlier study, a team from the University of California, Berkeley speculated that a baby tooth helped stabilize the permanent tooth against sideways breakage as it emerged from the gums. The baby tooth–also called a milk canine–are the types of teeth that all mammals grow and lose sometime before adulthood. The growth data seemed to imply that the two teeth sat there together for up to 30 months into the animal’s adolescence. 

[Related: Mighty sabertooth tigers may have purred like kittens.]

To investigate this tooth stabilization theory for the new study, the team used computer models that simulate a saber-tooth’s strength and stiffness against the sideways bending that happens when the saber tooth grows outwards. They also tested and bent plastic models of saber teeth. They found evidence that while fearsome, the saber tooth would have been increasingly vulnerable to breaking off as they emerged from the gums. Having the baby or milk tooth behind it would have worked like a buttress to make it significantly more stable. 

The temporary baby milk canine remaining behind long after the permanent saber tooth erupted indicates that it would have stayed in until the maturing cats learned how to hunt without damaging them. 

“The double-fang stage is probably worth a rethinking now that I’ve shown there’s this potential insurance policy, this larger range of protection,” study co-author and Cal Berkley paleontologist Jack Tseng said in a statement. “It allows the equivalent of our teenagers to experiment, to take risks, essentially to learn how to be a full-grown, fully fledged predator. I think that this refines, though it doesn’t solve, thinking about the growth of saber tooth use and hunting through a mechanical lens.”

Applying some beam theory

Some of the double-fanged specimens found from the La Brea tar pits are considered rare cases of animals with a delayed loss of a baby tooth. This gave Tseng the idea that maybe they had an evolutionary purpose. He used  the beam theory engineering analysis to model real saber teeth.

“According to beam theory, when you bend a blade-like structure laterally sideways in the direction of their narrower dimension, they are quite a lot weaker compared to the main direction of strength,” said Tseng. “Prior interpretations of how saber tooths may have hunted use this as a constraint. No matter how they use their teeth, they could not have bent them a lot in a lateral direction.”

The beam theory combined with computer models that simulated the sideways forces of a saber tooth could withstand before breaking. As the tooth got longer, it became easier to bend, increasing the chance of breakage.

[Related: This tiger-sized, saber-toothed, rhino-skinned predator thrived before the ‘Great Dying.’]

When a supportive baby tooth was added to the beam theory model, the stiffness of the permanent saber kept pace with the bending strength. This baby tooth essentially reduced its chance of breakage. 

The study has implications for how saber-toothed cats and other saber-toothed animals like Africa’s Inostrancevia africana may have hunted as adults. They likely used their predatory skills and strong muscles to compensate for the more vulnerable canines. 

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This article was originally published on KFF Health News.

For decades, concerns about automobile pollution have focused on what comes out of the tailpipe. Now, researchers and regulators say, we need to pay more attention to toxic emissions from tires as vehicles roll down the road.

At the top of the list of worries is a chemical called 6PPD, which is added to rubber tires to help them last longer. When tires wear on pavement, 6PPD is released. It reacts with ozone to become a different chemical, 6PPD-q, which can be extremely toxic—so much so that it has been linked to repeated fish kills in Washington state.

The trouble with tires doesn’t stop there. Tires are made primarily of natural rubber and synthetic rubber, but they contain hundreds of other ingredients, often including steel and heavy metals such as copper, lead, cadmium, and zinc.

As car tires wear, the rubber disappears in particles, both bits that can be seen with the naked eye and microparticles. Testing by a British company, Emissions Analytics, found that a car’s tires emit 1 trillion ultrafine particles per kilometer driven—from 5 to 9 pounds of rubber per internal combustion car per year.

And what’s in those particles is a mystery, because tire ingredients are proprietary.

“You’ve got a chemical cocktail in these tires that no one really understands and is kept highly confidential by the tire manufacturers,” said Nick Molden, CEO of Emissions Analytics. “We struggle to think of another consumer product that is so prevalent in the world and used by virtually everyone, where there is so little known of what is in them.”

Regulators have only begun to address the toxic tire problem, though there has been some action on 6PPD.

The chemical was identified by a team of researchers, led by scientists at Washington State University and the University of Washington, who were trying to determine why coho salmon returning to Seattle-area creeks to spawn were dying in large numbers.

Working for the Washington Stormwater Center, the scientists tested some 2,000 substances to determine which one was causing the die-offs, and in 2020 they announced they’d found the culprit: 6PPD.

The Yurok Tribe in Northern California, along with two other West Coast Native American tribes, have petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to prohibit the chemical. The EPA said it is considering new rules governing the chemical. “We could not sit idle while 6PPD kills the fish that sustain us,” said Joseph L. James, chairman of the Yurok Tribe, in a statement. “This lethal toxin has no place in any salmon-bearing watershed.”

California has begun taking steps to regulate the chemical, last year classifying tires containing it as a “priority product,” which requires manufacturers to search for and test substitutes.

“6PPD plays a crucial role in the safety of tires on California’s roads and, currently, there are no widely available safer alternatives,” said Karl Palmer, a deputy director at the state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control. “For this reason, our framework is ideally suited for identifying alternatives to 6PPD that ensure the continued safety of tires on California’s roads while protecting California’s fish populations and the communities that rely on them.”

The U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association says it has mobilized a consortium of 16 tire manufacturers to carry out an analysis of alternatives. Anne Forristall Luke, USTMA president and CEO, said it “will yield the most effective and exhaustive review possible of whether a safer alternative to 6PPD in tires currently exists.”

Molden, however, said there is a catch. “If they don’t investigate, they aren’t allowed to sell in the state of California,” he said. “If they investigate and don’t find an alternative, they can go on selling. They don’t have to find a substitute. And today there is no alternative to 6PPD.”

California is also studying a request by the California Stormwater Quality Association to classify tires containing zinc, a heavy metal, as a priority product, requiring manufacturers to search for an alternative. Zinc is used in the vulcanization process to increase the strength of the rubber.

When it comes to tire particles, though, there hasn’t been any action, even as the problem worsens with the proliferation of electric cars. Because of their quicker acceleration and greater torque, electric vehicles wear out tires faster and emit an estimated 20% more tire particles than the average gas-powered car.

A recent study in Southern California found tire and brake emissions in Anaheim accounted for 30% of PM2.5, a small-particulate air pollutant, while exhaust emissions accounted for 19%. Tests by Emissions Analytics have found that tires produce up to 2,000 times as much particle pollution by mass as tailpipes.

These particles end up in water and air and are often ingested. Ultrafine particles, even smaller than PM2.5, are also emitted by tires and can be inhaled and travel directly to the brain. New research suggests tire microparticles should be classified as a pollutant of “high concern.”

In a report issued last year, researchers at Imperial College London said the particles could affect the heart, lungs, and reproductive organs and cause cancer.

People who live or work along roadways, often low-income, are exposed to more of the toxic substances.

Tires are also a major source of microplastics. More than three-quarters of microplastics entering the ocean come from the synthetic rubber in tires, according to a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the British company Systemiq.

And there are still a great many unknowns in tire emissions, which can be especially complex to analyze because heat and pressure can transform tire ingredients into other compounds.

One outstanding research question is whether 6PPD-q affects people, and what health problems, if any, it could cause. A recent study published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters found high levels of the chemical in urine samples from a region of South China, with levels highest in pregnant women.

The discovery of 6PPD-q, Molden said, has sparked fresh interest in the health and environmental impacts of tires, and he expects an abundance of new research in the coming years. “The jigsaw pieces are coming together,” he said. “But it’s a thousand-piece jigsaw, not a 200-piece jigsaw.”

This article was produced by KFF Health News, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation. 

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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It’s long been known that mice can be trained to perform simple tasks in exchange for a reward. Bribe a hungry mouse with a morsel of food or a thirsty mouse with a drop of water and you can encourage it to navigate a maze or click a particular button. But sometimes, mice don’t act as expected, failing to complete the task at hand. Often, researchers have dismissed these actions as simple mistakes, resulting from inattention or disengagement. Yet, a study published April 26 in the journal Current Biology suggests, there’s more going on: mice can understand the rules of a task and still deviate in their behaviors, potentially testing their own hypotheses and attempting to learn more about their surroundings. 

It appears that the decisions mice make during behavioral tests are more complicated than just basic reward-seeking choices. During human-imposed trials in the lab, mice may be continually exploring and re-testing the rules of their environment and performing their own small experiments.

[ Related: Mice may be able to recognize their own reflections ]

The findings expand our understanding of what’s happening inside rodent brains and indicate mice and other non-verbal animals might know more than they let on. The research could eventually help shed light on the neurological underpinnings of human behavior as well. “These mice have a richer internal life than we probably give them credit for,” says Kishore Kuchibhotla, senior study author and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. “They are not just stimulus response machines. They may have things like strategies,” he adds.

Mice at the steering wheel

The work builds on previous research that tested mice on a simple licking task and adds a level of complexity with a two-choice test to parse mouse motivations. Kuchibhotla and lead study author Ziyi Zhu, a neuroscience PhD student, trained thirsty mice, restrained in place,  to spin a wheel with their front legs in a certain direction in response to a sound. One tone corresponded with turning the wheel to the right, a second tone with spinning it to the left. If a mouse responded to either of the sounds with the correct action, it would get a tiny cup of water. If it spun the wheel the wrong way or didn’t spin it at all, nothing happened. 

Throughout thousands of trials involving 13 mice, the researchers tracked mouse choice, response speed, and accuracy, and they noticed several patterns. For one, mice seemed to get more accurate in their decisions as the trials progressed, indicating they were mastering the task at hand. Individual mice also seemed to have quirks and preferences when it came to picking a wheel direction. And even when mice reached an expert level of wheel-steering competency, they would still display short bouts of wrong responses–often spinning the wheel in the same direction repeatedly, regardless of which sound was played. 

[ Related: How video game tech, AI, and computer vision help decode animal pain and behavior ]

To better understand what was happening during these bouts, Kuchibhotla and Zhu instituted “probe” trials, where they temporarily stopped rewarding the mice for correct answers. Very quickly, mice changed course, stopped exploring, and began to respond to the right and left sound cues more accurately, in accordance with the pattern they’d been trained on–indicating the mice understood what they were supposed to do to get the cup of water, and had been purposefully forsaking reward.

“As behavioral neuroscientists who work in animal models, the onus is on us to come up with more clever and rich ways to extract meaning from nonverbal animals’ [actions],” says Dr. Brian Sweis PhD, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Mount Sinai who conducts animal behavior research but was not involved in the new study. “I think this paper did a really nice job of that… it was a beautiful deep dive into a behavioral analysis,” he adds–pointing especially to the follow-up examination of the initial trial data and the ways the researchers varied their experiments. 

Using a computational model, Zhu and Kuchibhotla assessed how each trial outcome related to the ones before and after it and what factors seemed to be influencing mouse behavior. They found that reward played a big role, but so did a bias towards rotating the wheel in a preferred direction, which differed from mouse to mouse. Yet this bias wasn’t fixed–mice would switch it up, spinning to both sides over the course of many trials and when the researchers presented mice with sound prompts for exclusively their preferred direction, the mice would exhibit more periods of rotating the wheel to their non-preferred side. Taken altogether, these observations show a dynamic choice bias that the researchers hypothesize is a learning strategy. 

Learning without language

 “Mice are surprisingly using higher-order approaches to learn even simple tasks, which may seem maladaptive. It may look like the animal is making a ton of errors, but during those errors, it’s actually getting smarter,” says Kuchibhotla. “We put these animals in these bizarre situations. They don’t know when the environment may change. They don’t know when we may change the rules on them. There’s value in having this sort of continuous exploration.”

Where humans can rely on language to understand an assignment, non-verbal animals have to find out for themselves what the rules of a particular situation are. Kuchibhotla suggests this difference could account for why mice take on this continually shifting approach to a task. “Verbal or written instructions collapse the mental space of exploration. Once you know what you’re supposed to do, there’s no need to explore. That’s one of the hypotheses we have–that in the absence of instructions humans will [also] engage in continuous exploration.” He’s currently conducting follow-up research in human behavioral trials to determine if that’s true. 

Finding lessons in mouse mistakes

Other follow-up work includes tracking the mice’s neural activity as they engage in the wheel spinning task, training and testing the mice on multiple tasks at once to see how strategies change, and running cognitively impaired mice through similar tests which could ultimately reveal underlying patterns in human neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s.

There are limitations to what this single study proves. Despite all the researchers’ carefulness, something simpler than strategizing could still be at play, offers Sweis. For instance, maybe the mice changed the direction they spun the wheel in every so often because their front legs got tired. “I don’t think that negates anything [the study authors are] showing here, but physical factors could be a driver,” says Sweis. “We have to understand the brian in the context of the whole body.”

Still though, examining the choice process, he explains, “gives us insight into the many different ways the brain can work” and can clarify what’s happening when things start to go wrong. He suggests another follow-up project could look at how aging influences the exploration process and if task flexibility shifts or declines with age. There are many possible offshoots for interesting research, and the study “serves as a rich foundation for us to understand biology a little bit more.” 

It reframes decades of rodent behavior results, where errors were dismissed as uninteresting failures. “Animals need to make mistakes to learn,” says Sweis–and there’s lots we can learn from them too.

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Red squirrels living in Canada’s Yukon territory can have a pretty hard knock life. Bitterly cold winters, resource scarcity, intense competition for habitat, threats from large predators like the Canada lynx, and even take big reproductive risks for their genetic fitness. All of these stressors take their toll on these resilient rodents. Their early life struggles can also leave a lasting mark. The more challenges young red squirrels face in the year they’re born, the shorter their adult lifespan. The findings are detailed in a study published April 24 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences and could have some implications for humans. 

Food booms

Red squirrels are about 11 inches long and weigh just over half a pound on average. They are known for their rust colored fur and “scolding chatter” above the trees. The new study uses data collected by the Kluane Red Squirrel Project, a multi-university long-term field study. The project has tracked and studied thousands of wild North American red squirrels in the southwestern region of the Yukon for more than 30 years that individually tags and tracks individual red squirrels to learn how they deal with all that’s thrown at them  . 

The new study analyzing the observations found that red squirrels that survive past their first year go on to live about 3.5 years on average. However, early life adversity like food scarcity can cut their life expectancy by at least 14 percent.

[Related: A Medieval strain of leprosy is infecting squirrels in the UK.]

“The ecosystem red squirrels inhabit in this region is unique,” study co-author and University of Arizona ecologist and evolutionary biologist Lauren Petrullo said in a statement. “Every three to seven years, their favorite food–seed from cones of white spruce trees–is produced in superabundance during what we call a food boom.”

The team found that even though these food booms are rare, they can interrupt some biological processes for the squirrels and help shape their lifespans.

“If a squirrel had a harsh first year of life, if they were lucky enough to experience a food boom in their second year of life, they lived just as long–if not longer–in spite of early-life adversity,” said Petrullo.

Rodents as proxies

Rodents like squirrels, rice, and mats, are often used as models for humans in a lab setting. However, the laboratory environment often has limited relevance to the bigger pictures of what is going on at an ecological and evolutionary level. 

“It can be hard to really replicate the ecological challenges that animals have evolved to cope with in a lab setting,” said Petrullo. 

Wild red squirrels can offer scientists a chance to better study the role that early-life environment plays. Petrullo and her colleagues hope that continued observations in the wild can help them learn more about the biological mechanisms that link squirrels’ early developmental conditions with their later-life survival. This could have some insights into our understanding of human resilience. 

[Related: Nature wasn’t healing: What really happened with wildlife during pandemic lockdowns.]

“Our findings in red squirrels echo what we know about how early-life adversity can shorten adult lifespan in humans and other primates,” Petrullo said. “Humans vary widely in how vulnerable or resilient they are to challenges faced during early development. Our study demonstrates that future environmental quality might be an important factor that can explain why some individuals appear to be more, or less, susceptible to the consequences of early-life adversity.” 

‘Born with a silver spoon’

While growing up as a young red squirrel in the Yukon can be quite difficult, there are some things that can go right. 

“Some red squirrels have the luck of being born into gentler early environments, akin to being born with a silver spoon,” Petrullo said. “Because of this, we’ve got this really nice individual variation in early-life environmental quality across a natural ecological environment.”
However, as global temperatures continue to climb, this environment is expected to see a good deal of change. It’s possible that food booms and other ecological patterns could change right alongside the climate and the connections between early-life experiences and lifespan could also shift. According to Petrullo, these changes could offer more insight into how animals may continue to adapt to environments that are only getting more challenging to survive in. Future study could also help scientists learn more about what environmental factors can buffer these squirrels from ongoing environmental threats.

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About five million years ago, the North American Pacific Northwest was teeming with some pretty big fish that would have made the continent’s biggest salmon runs look small. An eight to 10-feet-long prehistoric salmon species called Oncorhynchus rastrosus stalked the seas and streams of the Miocene. It weighed upwards of 400 pounds and was almost twice as long and three times heavier than today’s largest salmon species–the Chinook/king salmon. 

Oncorhynchus rastrosus also sported a formidable pair of front teeth that projected out from the sides of their mouths like tusks, but not like fangs as scientists previously believed. This major dental update is detailed in a study published April 24 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Oncorhynchus rastrosus was first described in 1972. At the time, scientists believed that its large oversize teeth pointed backwards into the month like fangs. This largest known member of the Salmonidae family was commonly called the “saber-toothed salmon” due to the position of its teeth. However, CT scans of some newer Oncorhynchus rastrosus fossils and analysis in the study confirmed that these two-inch long curved chompers were more similar to a warthog’s tusks. This makes the species more of a “spike-toothed salmon.”

“This is all part of the scientific process. You have an idea and you get new information,” study co-author and University of Oregon paleobiologist Edward Davis tells PopSci. “It’s a good reminder of the humility you need to have as a scientist.”

[Related: A gator-faced fish shaped like a torpedo stalked rivers 360 million years ago.]

Scientists are not exactly sure what these signature tusks were used for, but believe they were primarily used to fight off other salmon or predators. They also may have been a way for female fish to dig nests for their eggs or even to help both sexes swim upstream to spawn.

“When they’re swimming upstream, they could maybe hook the spikes on something and take a rest without having to use any energy,” says Davis. “It’s sort of like if you’re holding on to the side of the swimming pool.”

With these tusks, they would have been as “equally fearsome” as their male counterparts, according to study co-author and professor and curator of fishes at Oregon State University Brian Sidlauskas.

Their teeth likely weren’t used for catching prey. The spike-toothed salmon may have been a filter-feeder that dined on tiny organisms called plankton. This filter feeding may have been one of the reasons they reached such titanic sizes. Their relatives the sockeye salmon as well as baleen whales and basking sharks have bony features called gill rakers that they use to filter out oxygen and microorganisms from the water. According to Davis, Oncorhynchus rastrosus have an unusually large number of gill rakers. Filter feeding with these gill takers possibly helped them grow since it could consume larger organisms like jellyfish and get more nutrients. 

They also lived in an environment with the food and water resources that could support their large bodies. In this way, studying the spike-toothed salmon can also give clues about what might be in store for the planet as temperatures continue to rise. They lived at the end of the Miocene, when the world’s oceans were much warmer than today. Global carbon dioxide levels were also near what Earth could see in the year 2100. Like today’s salmon, they hatched in freshwater, went into the ocean, and then returned back into the freshwater to spawn and die. 

“But these fish were huge,” says Davis. “That means there had to be a lot more water in those ancient rivers than we see today, to give them the space to be able to swim all the way up into eastern Oregon.”

[Related: The salmon of 2100 will have new habitat: the remains of melted glaciers.]

Oncorhynchus rastrosus went extinct as the Earth began to cool towards the end of the Miocene. This change in climate likely depleted them of the resources that they needed to sustain such large bodies. 

In future studies, Davis and his colleagues plan to do a closer analysis of some

spike-toothed salmon specimens. While a complete skeleton has yet to be found, a number of fossils belonging to this enormous fish have been uncovered in recent years. They also hope to come up with new models to study how these tusk-like teeth were used and better understand what extinct ecosystems can teach us. 

“Cool extinct animals get people excited about science and the ancient world. But it’s important to understand that ancient world because it gives us a window into what the world could be like in future scenarios,” says Davis. “By looking at how the giant salmon lived on this much warmer Earth, we can think about what resources are going to change over the next 80 years if our Earth is returning to that warmer state.”

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Modern robotics is awash with human-made machines mimicking the animal world. From stadium-surveying robot dogs to daddy long-legs-inspired exploration bots and just about everything in-between, there’s no shortage of mechanized animal doppelgängers roaming the world. Advancements in AI systems, new synthetic materials, and 3D printing have greatly improved these machines’ ability to run, climb, and shimmy their way around obstacles, often in the name of scientific exploration or public after. 

But even with those technical advances and billions of dollars worth investment poured into the robotics industry in recent years, mechanized machines by and large still still lag behind against their biological equals in a head-to-head race. That basic observation underpins a new study by an interdisciplinary group of researchers published this week in the journal Science Robotics. 

The researchers looked at five different “subsystems” associated with running and compared how they stack up better between animals and their robot counterparts. Animals, which rely on a tapestry of delicate bones and tissues, initially seem worse than machines on almost every individual component level. Their true advantage, the researchers discovered, actually lies in their complex and interconnected control over their bodies. That fluid interoperability makes animals greater than the sum of their individual parts. 

“The way things turned out is that, with only minor exceptions, the engineering subsystems outperform the biological equivalents—and sometimes radically outperformed them,” SRI International Senior Research Engineer and paper co-author Tom Libby said in a statement. “But also what’s very, very clear is that, if you compare animals to robots at the whole system level, in terms of movement, animals are amazing. And robots have yet to catch up.”

Animals benefit from biological complexity and generations of evolution 

Each of the five researchers focused on one specific subsystem associated with running in both animals and machines. These systems were broken down into power, frame, actuation, sensing, and control. Individually, machines beat out animals in almost all of these categories. In the case of frames, for example, robots with lightweight but strong carbon fiber bodies could support larger mass structures without buckling compared to animal bones. Similarly, the researchers concluded a robot’s computer-aided control system outperforms an animal’s nervous system in terms of overall latency and bandwidth. 

But even though robots seemingly have stronger, more robust individual parts, animas are nonetheless more adept at making them work seamlessly together as a cohesive “whole.” That difference plays itself plainly when animals and robots are tested in real-world environments. While newer robots can certifiably accelerate quickly and even perform some acrobatic feats they pale in comparison to their biological counterparts in terms of fluidity and adaptability. Robots sometimes navigate tough terrain, but animals can effortlessly overcome obstacles like mud, snow, vegetation, and rubble without thinking twice about what they are doing. 

[ Related: Can this robot help solve a guide dog shortage? ]

“A wildebeest can migrate for thousands of [kilometers] over rough terrain, a mountain goat can climb up a literal cliff, finding footholds that don’t even seem to be there, and cockroaches can lose a leg and not slow down,” Simon Fraser University Department of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology professor Max Donelan wrote. “We have no robots capable of anything like this endurance, agility and robustness.”

Animals also have another huge leg up: time. Unlike advanced robots which have only really made strides in the past few decades, animals have had millions, or in some cases, billions of years of evolution on their side. Animals, the researchers note, have a “substantial headstart over engineering.” On the flip side, robots have done an admirable job of closing that gap with staggering speed. The researchers say they are “optimistic” that robots will someday outrun animals.

“It [advances in robots] will move faster, because evolution is undirected,” University of Washington Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering Associate Professor Sam Burden said. “There are ways that we can move much more quickly when we engineer robots than we can through evolution—but evolution has a massive head start.”

Researchers hope these findings could help future development of running robots. Armed with these findings, robot makers could decide to focus more of their time and effort on component integration rather than simply building ever better and stronger hardware. 

“The lesson we take from biology is that, although further improvements to components and subsystems are beneficial, the greatest opportunity to improve running robots is to make better use of existing parts,” the researchers wrote.”

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Check out Weirdest Thing’s new page on Reddit to meet fellow Weirdos!

FACT: These birds help humans hunt for honey, but it’s not as sweet as you might think

By Rachel Feltman

The greater honeyguide is a sub-Saharan bird that engages in a behavior that’s so fascinating to people that its entire genus and its entire family is named for it, even though they’re the only species in the bunch that definitely acts this way.

These birds literally guide humans to sources of honey. Humans call to the birds for help, the birds recognize the request and start leading the way, and the humans follow them straight to a big honeycomb. Hunter-gatherers are almost six-times more likely to find hives with a honeyguide assist than they are without. 

The people in question are The Hadza of Northern Tanzania. Even if you don’t recognize their name, you’ve almost certainly heard of or read research about them. If you’ve read an article about, for example, how eating a modern diet versus a traditional hunter-gatherer diet changes our microbiome, it was almost certainly based on research on the Hadza. 

Speaking of research on Hadza diets: Scientists have found that honey makes up a surprisingly large percentage of their caloric intake. It can make up around 20% of the calories they consume. 

That’s where the honeyguide bird comes in with a big assist. Some researchers estimate that up to 10% of the Hadza’s total diet is foraged with the help of these birds.

Incredible, right? But a lot of popular media on the subject takes things a little too far in the Disney Princess direction.

A lot of depictions of this process—including some documentaries—suggest that this is a mutually-beneficial partnership between birds and humans. Humans ask for help, birds provide it, and humans pay the animals for their services with chunks of honeycomb full of wax and grubs for them to eat. 

But as this feature in Atlas Obscura by Cara Giaimo explains, that isn’t quite true—and the sunnier portrayal of this relationship can cause trouble for the Hadza. Check out the article—and this week’s episode—for more on the (still very awesome) truth behind the misinformation. 

FACT: A barber may have come close to launching a massive revolt—until the Civil War got in the way

By Joel Cook

On this week’s episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, I’m sharing one of my favorite stories from my own show, Rogue History. It’s the story of a traveling barber named Moses Dickson. This jack-of-all-trades (seriously, he opened a fine dining restaurant at one point) may have laid the groundwork for a major insurrection. Dickson claimed to have recruited a vast network of enslaved people and free allies who were gearing up to revolt against their oppressors. He said the only reason it didn’t happen was that the Civil War started brewing, and he figured he’d let actual armies do the legwork instead. 

That might sound like a convenient claim for some random barber to make, but there’s some evidence that Dickson really had been about to light the fuse on a huge insurrection. Learn more in this week’s episode. You can also check out the Rogue History episode that inspired this fact.

FACT: Rats love taking selfies, too 

By Sara Kiley Watson

What’s not to love about a selfie? Millions are taken every single day, though the reasons why we snap so many pics of ourselves are still up in the air. Some folks guess it’s for vanity, but research has also shown that capturing a quick selfie can help us remember deeper meanings of those day-to-day events or big moments. 

One recent project from a Paris-based professional photographer and grad student shows that humans might not be the only animals that love a cheeky self-portrait. 

A Skinner box-inspired experiment showed that rats got a kick out of pressing a button that snapped selfies. They also enjoyed viewing the resulting images—even if they weren’t lured by a treat to do so. Of course, the psychological significance of rat selfies is still a mystery, and we’ll need to do a lot more research to truly understand our shared love of self-portraits (and/or button-pushing). But in the meantime, the photos produced by these curious little critters are still cute as can be. You can see them here. 

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Many marine organisms–including sea worms, some jellyfish, sea pickles, and more–can emit ethereal glow through a process called bioluminescence. The evolutionary origins of this light production remain a mystery, but an international team of scientists have found that bioluminescence may have first evolved in a group of marine invertebrates called octocorals at least 540 million years ago–nearly 300 million years earlier than they previously believed. This new timeline could help scientists unravel bioluminescence’s origin story. The findings are detailed in a study published April 23 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

What is bioluminescence? 

Bioluminescent organisms produce light via chemical reactions. This ability has independently evolved at least 94 times in nature. Bioluminescence is involved in multiple animal behaviors including communication, courtship, camouflage, and hunting. Fireflies, glowworms, and even some species of fungi on land are also considered bioluminescent organisms. 

“Nobody quite knows why it first evolved in animals,” Andrea Quattrini, a study co-author and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s curator of corals, said in a statement. 

The earliest dated example of bioluminescence in animals was believed to be roughly 267 million years ago in small marine crustaceans known for a mucus-filled synchronized mating dance called ostracods, until this new research turned back the clock. 

An octocoral evolutionary tree

In the study, the team looked back into the evolutionary history of octocorals to search for clues to when it first appeared in animals. Octocorals are an ancient and frequently bioluminescent group of living animals that includes sea fans, sea pens, and soft corals. Just like hard corals, octocorals are tiny colonial polyps that build up a reef structure, but they are primarily soft bodied and not stony. The octocorals that glow generally light up when they are bumped or otherwise disturbed. According to the team, this makes the precise function of their ability to produce light a bit of a puzzle  

[Related: These newly discovered bioluminescent sea worms are named after Japanese folklore.]

“We wanted to figure out the timing of the origin of bioluminescence, and octocorals are one of the oldest groups of animals on the planet known to bioluminesce,” study co-author and  Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History postdoctoral scholar Danielle DeLeo said in a statement. “So, the question was when did they develop this ability?”

They turned to a detailed evolutionary tree of octocorals that was built in 2022. This map of evolutionary relationships–or phylogeny–used the genetic data from 185 different species of octocorals. The team then placed two octocoral fossils of known ages within the tree based on  their physical features. They were able to use the fossils’ ages and their respective positions in the evolutionary tree to determine roughly when octocoral lineages split apart to become two or more branches. The team ultimately mapped out the evolutionary relationships that featured all of the known bioluminescent species alive today.

With this evolutionary tree and branches that contained bioluminescent species labeled, the team used a statistical technique called ancestral state reconstruction to analyze the relationships between the species.

“If we know these species of octocorals living today are bioluminescent, we can use statistics to infer whether their ancestors were highly probable to be bioluminescent or not,” said Quattrini. “The more living species with the shared trait, the higher the probability that as you move back in time that those ancestors likely had that trait as well.”

Multiple different statistical methods all reached the same result. About 540 million years ago, the common ancestor of all octocorals was very likely bioluminescent. This is about 273 million years earlier than in the ostracod crustaceans that were previously considered the earliest evolutionary example of bioluminescence in animals.

According to the team, the octocorals’ thousands of living species and relatively high incidence of bioluminescence suggests that glowing played a role in the group’s evolutionary success. While this does not exactly answer what octocorals are using bioluminescence for, the fact that it has been retailed for so long shows how important this form of communication has become for their survival. 

Conservation implications

Now that the team knows that the common ancestor of all octocorals likely could already produce its own inner glow, they are interested in conducting a more thorough count of which of the group’s more than 3,000 known living species are still bioluminescent and which have lost the trait over time. This may have them pinpoint a set of ecological circumstances that correlate with bioluminesce and potentially shed some light on its function. 

The team is also working on creating a genetic test to determine if an octocoral species has functional copies of the genes for luciferase–an enzyme involved in bioluminescence. Future studies could even show that bioluminescence is even more ancient and embedded in coral’s evolutionary history. 

[Related: Surprise! These sea cucumbers glow.]

The study also points to evolutionary insight that could help monitor and manage octocorals in today’s oceans. They are currently threatened by mineral mining, fishing, oil and gas extraction and spills, and human-made climate change. 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently confirmed that the planet is currently experiencing the fourth global coral bleaching event on record and the second in the last 10 years due to heat stress from increasingly warming oceans. Octocorals can bleach the way that hard corals can under extreme temperatures. Understanding more about how they use bioluminescence could help scientists better identify their habitats and monitor their behaviors. Better knowledge of their genetics and what they need to survive can also inform better conservation policies for these marine organisms. 

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Subjecting hospital staff and patients to the snake that bit you won’t help your treatment–and it might even obstruct your care, doctors told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) earlier this month.

Australia is home to some of the most venomous snakes on Earth, including the inland taipan and eastern brown snakes, yet reports of fatal snake bites are relatively rare on the continent, with bites documented only a couple times per year. Still, there are around 3,000 reported snake bites per year in Australia and as many as 500 of those cases require antivenom treatment, as noted by Business Insider.

After any snake bite, Australian health officials say victims should immediately seek medical care; but trying to catch, kill, or photograph the snake after a bite “just puts people at risk,” said Dr. Adam Michael, the emergency medicine director at Bundaberg Hospital in the north-eastern state of Queensland. 

“We want people to be able to get seen and assessed quickly and having a live snake in the department slows up that process,” the director told ABC. He spoke to the news outlet after a patient brought in a “not very well secured” eastern brown, which he said had frightened staff and ultimately caused delays.

Hospital staff aren’t trained to identify snakes, said Dr. Geoff Isbister, who leads clinical toxicology research at the University of Newcastle near Sydney. Still, the researcher told ABC that he’d heard of multiple incidents in which victims brought snakes along with them to the hospital after a bite. “If that snake gets out in an emergency department, that becomes a huge disaster,” Dr. Isbister said.

Instead of inspecting the snake itself, medical staff assess if victims need anti-venom “based on clinical signs, blood tests and also the snake venom detection kits that we keep here at the hospital,” Dr. Michael added. 

Neither doctor spoke to the exact number of incidents they’d observed in which a snakebite patient brought their assailant in tow. However, local snake catcher Jonas Murphy told ABC that he’s personally “relocated several snakes brought into the Bundaberg Hospital,” the outlet wrote. Murphy echoed the doctors’ reasoning in a comment to ABC.

“You are risking a follow-up bite and you’re putting everyone around you in danger as well,” the snake catcher explained.

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Many of Madagascar’s charismatic lemurs are in big trouble. Slash and burn agriculture has destroyed their habitat and made most of its subspecies vulnerable to extinction. Now, critically endangered diademed sifaka lemurs (Propithecus diadema) are being attacked by another vulnerable species, a cat-like carnivore called the fosa (Crytoprocta ferox, also spelled fossa). 

A study published April 9 in the journal Ecology and Evolution details very rare observations of how diademed sifaka lemurs at Madagascar’s Betampona Strict Nature Reserve have been attacked by fosas. Fosas are reddish brown animals with slender bodies and long tails. They are excellent climbers and are often compared to cougars. However, they are actually part of the weasel family. 

The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources also categorizes the fosa as vulnerable and at risk of extinction. Nearly all of the lemurs that fosas have now been observed eating are also at risk of extinction. The fosas also prey on birds and rodents. 

The impact of this new predation by the fosa combined with low reproductive rates and a potentially high inbreeding in the lemur population of Betampona could affect the survival of this species at this site. Betampona is Madagascar’s first protected reserve. It includes roughly 5,400 acres of rainforest on the island’s east coast, surrounded by agricultural land. This makes it difficult for the lemurs and other animals in the reserve to find other eligible animals to mate with. 

[Related: Giant beasts once roamed Madagascar. What happened to them?]

In this new study, a team from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar came across one fosa preying on diademed sifaka lemur during the team’s daily behavioral observations.

“What we saw was very rare. There are other small carnivores in Madagascar, but they are not big enough to be able to prey upon an adult diademed sifaka [lemur] because they are among the biggest lemurs,” study co-author and Washington University in St. Louis biological anthropologist Giovanna Bonadonna said in a statement. “There are not so many predators that could actually get them.”

The team found that this dynamic can be particularly complex when the predation occurs in an isolated or poor-quality habitat without enough resources to go around. Also, fosas are rarely caught in the act since they are stealthy hunters. Previous studies could only gleam what they eat by examining the bones and other evidence left behind in their droppings. 

“We noticed that a female diademed sifaka [lemur] that we were following after the first attack didn’t run away very far,” study co-author and University of Antananarivo PhD student Onja Ramilijaona said in a statement. “Instead she stayed still and remained vigilant, looking at the fosa.”

Ramilijaona also documented the remains of another lemur that they presumed was killed by a fosa. Hair was scattered around the site and its abdominal contents were found near several bones. The tree branches nearby also indicated signs of a struggle between animals. The study describes other instances over 19 months of observations when the fosa appeared to stalk lemurs, but did not manage to take one of them down. 

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

While the Betampona reserve itself is protected, the forest’s relatively small size and isolation from other eligible mates can make it difficult for animals like the diademed sifaka lemurs to continue to breed and survive there.

“This population of diademed sifakas is already in bad shape,” Bonadonna said. “There is a huge predation pressure that was underestimated until we did this behavioral study. We were able to highlight inbreeding and other factors that may be behind the fact that this population cannot thrive at Betampona.”

Bonadonna stresses that fosas are not “the bad guy.” They are also in need of conservation and face threats from habitat loss, competition for food resources, and a bad reputation among humans who can often consider them pests. The study highlights just how difficult conservation can be. Human activities and behaviors can lead to changes within ecosystems and cascading effects on at-risk species, such as more inbreeding and lack of genetic diversity. 

“Despite the effort to conserve one species, it’s really the ecosystem and the balance of that ecosystem that is at stake once the habitat is compromised,” said Bonadonna.

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Lampreys look like something out of a horror movie, with their sucky mouths chock full of teeth, eel-like bodies, and parasitic behaviors. These “water vampires” represent a bit of an evolutionary fork in the road between vertebrates and invertebrates, and the scientific debate about just how closely related we are to these carnivorous fish has taken yet another turn. 

Scientists found some evidence that lampreys have a rudimentary sympathetic nervous system–which is believed to control the fight-or-flight reaction in vertebrates. The findings are detailed in a study published April 17 in the journal Nature and could prompt a rethink of the origins of the sympathetic nervous system.

Lampreys are the closest living organisms scientists have to studying the fish ancestors that vertebrates evolved from some 550 million years ago. They belong to an ancient vertebrate lineage called Agnatha–or jawless fish. Some scientists believe that they represent the earliest group of vertebrates that is still living and can give us an evolutionary window into all vertebrate ancestors. Other scientists question the theories due to a lack of lamprey evidence in the fossil record. 

[Related: Giant prehistoric lamprey likely sucked blood—and ate flesh.]

Scientists previously believed that lampreys did not have sympathetic neurons. These neurons are part of the sympathetic nervous system, a system of nerves that target the internal organs throughout the body including the gut, pancreas, and heart. The system works together to respond to dangerous or stressful situations. It also helps an organism’s body maintain homeostasis, making sure that the heart keeps pumping, the digestive system keeps moving, and more. 

In this new study, a team used lampreys to look at how developmental changes may have promoted the evolution of vertebrate traits like fight-or-flight. They found evidence of the types of stem cells that eventually form sympathetic neurons. The presence of these cells in lampreys could revise the timeline of when the sympathetic nervous system began to evolve. 

“Over a hundred years of literature has suggested that lamprey lack a sympathetic nervous system,” study co-author and California Institute of Technology biologist Marianne Bronner said in a statement. “Surprisingly, we found that sympathetic neurons do, in fact, exist in lamprey but arise at a much later time in lamprey development than expected.”

Bronner and her team studied neural crest cells. These are a kind of stem cells that are specific to vertebrates and give rise to the multiple cell types found throughout the body. Scientists previously believed that lampreys lacked the neural crest-derived precursors, or progenitors, that ultimately build the sympathetic nervous system.

According to Bronner, researchers previously looked for evidence of a sympathetic nervous system too early in lamprey development compared to other animals. For example, the sympathetic nervous system forms in the first two to three days of development in birds. 

[Related: You might have more in common with the sea lamprey than you realize.]

Study co-author and Cal Tech evolutionary biologist Brittany Edens looked at the neural crest–derived progenitor cells in lampreys that ultimately give rise to sympathetic neurons. She found that in lampreys, the neural crest–derived progenitors appear much later than other animals. They can appear as long as one month after fertilization. The cells also do not fully mature into neurons until about four months of development, during the fish’s larval stage.

It is still not known whether the sympathetic nervous system of lampreys controls fight-or-flight-like behaviors similar to other vertebrates. According to the team, these findings suggest that the developmental program that controls the formation of sympathetic neurons remains across all vertebrates, from lamprey to mammals. 

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The Central California coast is proving to be a playground for baby sharks. Earlier this year, we caught a glimpse of what could be the first images of a newborn great white shark. Now, we’re learning more about where they like to live during their formative years. Juvenile great white sharks select warm and shallow waters and congregate about half a mile from shore. These findings are described in a study published April 19 in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science and could have crucial conservation implications.

This water column is too cold

After they’re born, baby great white sharks–called pups–do not get any care from their parents. This new study looked at one of these populations of young sharks off Padaro Beach near Santa Barbara in Central California. Here, pups and juveniles gather together in ‘nurseries’ and are unaccompanied by adults in a sort of shark never, neverland, except these fish will eventually grow up.

“This is one of the largest and most detailed studies of its kind, because around Padaro Beach, large numbers of juveniles share near-shore habitats, we could learn how environmental conditions influence their movements,”study co-author and California State University, Long Beach marine biologist Christopher Lowe said in a statement. “You rarely see great white sharks exhibiting this kind of nursery behavior in other locations.”

[Related: This could be the first newborn great white shark ever captured on camera.]

In 2020 and 2021, the team tagged 22 juveniles with sensor-transmitters. Great white sharks can live for up to 40 to 70 years and the younger sharks in this study were all females and males between one and six years old. The sensor-transmitters measured local water pressure and temperature in real time. They also tracked each shark’s position by sending out “pings” to several receivers spread out over roughly two miles along the shoreline. 

When the juveniles temporarily left for offshore waters in the winter, the tracking was stopped. The team gathered more information on the temperature distribution with an autonomous underwater vehicle. With this data in hand, they used artificial intelligence to generate a 3D model of the juveniles’ temperature and depth preferences.

The juveniles dived to the greatest depths around dawn and dusk. This is likely when they were foraging for rays, skates, and schooling fish. They moved closer to the surface–between zero and 13 feet deep–during the afternoon when the sun was warmest. This shift towards the warmer water was potentially to increase their body temperature. They directly altered their vertical position within the water column to stay between 60 degrees and 71 degrees Fahrenheit. Their sweet spot also appeared to be between 68 and 71 degrees. 

“This may be their optimum to maximize growth efficiency within the nursery,” study co-author and California State University, Long Beach research technician Emily Spurgeon said in a statement. 

Keeping to the shallows

The temperature distribution in the water changes quite frequently, which means that the juveniles must constantly be on the move to remain within optimal range. They believe that this is why juvenile great white sharks spend more time in shallow water than adults tend to. Additionally, adult sharks were rarely observed in the nursery.

[Related: With new tags, researchers can track sharks into the inky depths of the ocean’s Twilight Zone.]

According to the team, the results show that the temperature distribution across three dimensions strongly impacted how the juvenile sharks were distributed. They spread out at greater depths when seafloor temperatures were warmer, and moved closer together towards the surface of the water when deeper water was cooler.

However, the team is still not sure what benefits the pups and juveniles have from gathering in nurseries in the first place. It could potentially help them avoid predators like some whales.

“Our results show that water temperature is a key factor that draws juveniles to the studied area,” said Spurgeon. “However, there are many locations across the California coast that share similar environmental conditions, so temperature isn’t the whole story. Future experiments will look at individual relationships, for example to see if some individuals move among nurseries in tandem.”

Great white sharks are considered vulnerable, with their populations decreasing in some parts of the world. Knowing where baby and juvenile sharks like to hang out can help inform better conservation laws to protect them as a species. It can also help protect the public from negative shark encounters. 

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Another day in science, another massive, ancient snake discovery. Paleontologists in India have unearthed fossilized vertebrae from a snake that slithered around the sub-continent about 47 million years ago and may have grown as long as nearly 50 feet. The newly discovered, extinct species is named Vasuki inidicus, after the mythical serpent coiled around the neck of the Hindu god Shiva, and is described for the first time in a study published April 18 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

“Vasuki is an important piece of an ancient puzzle. It contributes to our understanding of this extinct group, and also to our understanding of large, apex, top-of-the-foodchain snakes in general,” says John Jacisin III, a paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin who researches reptiles but was uninvolved in the new study. Beyond reptiles, the fossil find carries broader clues to India’s climate tens of millions of years ago. “It’s also just a cool snake because it was so big,” he says, comparing its length to longer than that of a yellow school bus. 

Sunil Bajpai, co-author of the study and a vertebrate paleontologist at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, first discovered the fossilized snake remains in 2005 at a coal mine in western India. Over the course of a slow and careful excavation, 27 vertebrates–all likely to be from the same individual–were uncovered. By analyzing the size ratios of various parts of the vertebrae and the fossils unique shapes and protrusions, Bajpai and his co-researcher established the remains were that of a new species in the extinct family of Madtsoiidae, which were primitive snakes similar to boas and pythons. 

The fist-sized fossils are second only in girth and width to those of Tintanoboa, another giant snake estimated to have lived about 58 million years ago in what is now present-day Colombia. Based on the age of the rock the newly described vertebrae were found in, the researchers date Vasuki to about 47 million years ago, just a few million years after the Indian tectonic plate began colliding with Eurasia. According to the new study, the timing supports the idea that Madtsoiids originated in India, and later moved to North Africa and southern Eurasia, where other, later fossil specimens have been found. 

It’s a challenge to accurately deduce total species body size from a single individual’s incomplete skeleton. But using model equations incorporating data on current, living snakes and the known fossil record, Bajpai and his colleague, Debajit Datta–another vertebrate paleontologist at the same institution, estimate that V. indicus was somewhere between about 36 and and 49.9 feet (10.9 and 15.2 meters) long. The only known snake of comparable size was Titanoboa, currently the record-holder for the largest snake to have ever lived. Titanoboa clocked in at an estimated 35 to 50 feet long, with the mean estimate around 42 feet in length. The relative vertebrate sizes indicate that Titanoboa was a heavier, thicker-bodied snake than V. indicus, yet it’s impossible to know exactly which snake species would’ve won the measuring contest. 

“Based on the data at hand Vasuki was only slightly smaller in length than Titanoboa,” Bajpai and Datta write in a joint email to PopSci. “However, we cannot entirely rule out the possibility of Vasuki being slightly larger than Titanoboa, because the fossil vertebrae in our collection may not have come from the largest individual of Vasuki. The same, however, can also be said for Titanoboa. Since neither of these snakes are known from complete skeletons, we cannot say with certainty whether one was longer or wider than the other.”

Exact size estimates are liable to change as more fossils are found and more analysis is done. “Everything shrinks when the tape measure comes out,” says Alexandra Howard, a paleobiologist and herpetologist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the new research. “It’s a running joke [in paleontology], everyone always finds the biggest thing,” she adds–and with more discovery and scrutiny the biggest size estimates tend to scale down. Nonetheless, Howard says the new discovery includes some very well-preserved fossils and is an interesting addition to our knowledge of ancient reptiles. “The past was full of giant snakes. That’s really cool,” she says.

And, either way, second place in size isn’t so bad, especially when you’re separated from your closest competitor by about 10 million years. Vasuki was probably a slow-slithering ambush predator that constricted its prey like a python, according to Bajpai and Datta. Based on morphology and the location it was found in, the researchers believe the monstrous snake was either terrestrial or semi-aquatic–living in marsh or coastal swamp. It was found in rock that also contains fossils of rays, sharks, bony fish, turtles, crocodiles, and primitive whales, Bajpai and Datta note–though what it ate is unclear. 

Beyond its massive size, the new paleontological discovery is notable for what it can tell us about our planet 47-50 million years ago. “It’s an important discovery because it shows us another example of extreme gigantism in snakes… and because you can use snakes as a thermometer to reconstruct climates of the past,” says Jason Head, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge in England who was one of the primary researchers involved in discovering Titanoboa. 

We know from geological and paleontological research that the time period, part of the Eocene Epoch, was warm, but Vasuki offers another data point indicating exactly what the climate may have been like where it was found. Snakes are ectotherms (commonly known as “cold-blooded”), so their body temperature and size is closely linked with the ambient temperature. The larger a snake is, the slower its metabolic rate, and so the warmer the climate must be for it to survive, Head explains. Estimates from modeling equations indicate that Vasuki’s habitat averaged around 28 degrees Celsius (82.4 degrees Fahrenheit), which is slightly warmer than the average annual temperature in the same region today. 

The ancient climate data can aid in understanding the present and where we’re headed under current climate change, says Head. “Those are the hottest latitudes and the hottest intervals, that’s going to tell us a lot about what those places might be like in the future.”

As paleontologists continue to dig into the past, predictions of the future may become clearer. And also, massive, ancient snakes are liable to keep appearing. “We understand so little about the past diversity of life on Earth,” Head notes. “I think there are probably more giant snakes to come.”

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Paleontologists already know that the extinct marine reptile ichthyosaurs were enormous. Some newly described jawbone fossils uncovered in England represent a new ichthyosaur species. The bones indicate that the ocean titan may have been over 82 feet long, and even pushed the possible limits of vertebrate size. The new find is detailed in a study published April 17 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

“This research has been ongoing for almost eight years. It is quite remarkable to think that gigantic, blue whale-sized ichthyosaurs were swimming in the oceans around what was the UK during the Triassic Period,” study co-author and University of Manchester paleontologist Dean Lomax said in a statement. “These jawbones provide tantalizing evidence that perhaps one day a complete skull or skeleton of one of these giants might be found. You never know.”

Meet the ichthyosaurs

Ichthyosaurs are an extinct group of reptiles that are distant relatives of today’s lizards and snakes. They had long fins and were potentially ambush predators like today’s great white sharks and wolves, feeding on fish and other marine dwellers. Ichthyosaurs also may have followed migration patterns that are similar to today’s whales. 

[Related: These ancient, swimming reptiles may have been the biggest animals of all time.]

They lived 228 to 112 million years ago and they were most abundant during the Triassic and Jurassic eras. There are over 100 known ichthyosaur species. Their remains have been found in parts of Asia, North America, and Europe. A fossil deposit in present day Nevada may have even been an ichthyosaur birthing ground. 

Solving a prehistoric jigsaw puzzle 

Over several years, a team from The University of Manchester has discovered and pieced together individual fragments of an ichthyosaur jawbone. A jawbone uncovered in 2016 at the Westbury Mudstone Formation in Somerset was similar to one collected from the same rock formation just a few miles away. The team believe that both of these jawbones belong to a previously undescribed species of ichthyosaur.

In 2020, a father and daughter from Devon named Justin and Ruby Reynolds found the first pieces of the second jawbone to be found in May 2020. Ruby was 11 years-old at the time and found the first chunk of giant bone before searching for more pieces. The family contacted Lomax and fossil collector and study co-author Paul de la Salle, who found the first jawbone in 2016. 

“I was amazed by the find. In 2018, my team studied and described Paul’s giant jawbone and we had hoped that one day another would come to light,” said Lomax. “This new specimen is more complete, better preserved, and shows that we now have two of these giant bones–called a surangular–that have a unique shape and structure. I became very excited, to say the least.”

Over time, several members of the Reynolds family, Paul, and Lomax’s research team visited the site to hunt for more pieces of this rare discovery. They found more pieces of the same jaw which happened to fit together perfectly.

[Related: Why kids make the best amateur fossil hunters.]

“It was so cool to discover part of this gigantic ichthyosaur. I am very proud to have played a part in a scientific discovery like this,” Ruby Reynolds said in a statement. Ruby and her father are both listed as co-authors of the new study. 

A new ichthyosaur species

The final piece of bone was recovered in October 2022. The research team found that the jaw bones belong to a new species of giant ichthyosaur they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, or “giant fish lizard of the Severn.” It was likely the size of the blue whale–today’s largest living organism. Comparing the two examples of the same bone with the same unique features from the same geologic time zone helps support the idea that it is a new species. 

The bones are about 202 million years old and date back to the end of the Triassic Period called the Rhaetian. During the Rhaetian, gigantic ichthyosaurs swam while dinosaurs walked on land. However, this was when ichthyosaurs’ time on Earth came to a close. They went extinct during the Late Triassic global mass extinction event some 200 million years ago and these bones represent the very last of their kind. Dinosaurs would not go on to live another 134 million years. 

While this new discovery is not the first giant ichthyosaur, these findings are unique among those known to science. These two bones appear about 13 million years after their latest geologic relatives. These include Shonisaurus sikanniensis from British Columbia, Canada, and Himalayasaurus tibetensis from Tibet, China. A closer examination of the bones’ internal structures also confirmed that the animal was likely still growing at its time of death.

“The anomalous periosteal growth of these bones hints at yet to be understood bone developmental strategies, now lost in the deep time, that likely allowed late Triassic ichthyosaurs to reach the known biological limits of vertebrates in terms of size,” Marcello Perillo, a study co-author and a paleobiology master’s student at the University of Bonn in Germany, said in a statement. “So much about these giants is still shrouded by mystery, but one fossil at a time we will be able to unravel their secret.”

The ichthyosaur bones will soon be on display at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

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Robotic engineers are no stranger to turning to nature for inspiration. In recent years, birds, dogs, extinct sea creatures, and even humans themselves have all served as jumping off point for new mechanical designs. Now, researchers from Stanford are citing the Harvestman spider, better known as a daddy long-legs as inspiration for a new robot design they believe could be better equipped at navigating uneven rocky caverns and lava tubes. One day, they hope this spider-like design could even help robots navigate the icy caverns of the moon and Mars. 

How does the spider robot work?

The researchers introduced their new machine called the “ReachBot” in a paper published today in the journal Science Robotics. ReachBot features multiple extendable boom limbs which it can use to reach out for rocks and propel itself forward. Each limb comes attached with a three finger gripper that grabs onto the rocks and uses them as anchor points. The long-legged design means the robot’s limbs can potentially access the floor, ceiling, and walls of a lava tube or cave, which in turn provide increased leverage. This unique positioning, the researchers write, lets the ReachBot “assume a wide variety of possible configurations, bracing stances, and force application options.”

ReachBot attempts to fill in a form-factor gap among existing exploration robots. Small robots, the researchers argue, are useful for navigating through tight corridors but typically have limited reach. Larger robots, by contrast, might be able to reach more area but can get bogged down by their heft mass and mechanical complexity. ReachBot offers a compromise by relying on a small main body with limbs that can expand and reach out if necessary. 

The robot utilizes a set of onboard sensors to scale the area ahead of it and look for concave rocks or other signs suggestive of a graspable area. Like a physical spider. ReachBot doesn’t immediately assume rock surfaces are flat, but instead seeks “rounded features that the gripper can partially enclose.” Researchers say they tested the robot in simulation to help it improve its ability to correctly identify grippable surface areas and aid in footstep planning. Following the simulation, ReachBot was tested in the real-world in an unmanned lava tube near Pisgah crater in Mojave Desert. 

“Results from the field test confirm the predictions of maximum grasp forces and underscore the importance of identifying and steering toward convex rock features that provide a strong grip,” the researchers write. “They also highlight a characteristic of grasp planning with ReachBot, which is that identifying, aiming for, and extending booms involves a higher level of commitment than grasping objects in manufacturing scenarios.”

ReachBot could help researchers explore deep caves and caverns on other planets

Researchers believe ReachBot’s arachnid design could have extraterrestrial applications. Lava tubes like in the Mojave Desert where the robot was tested removes some of the area on the surface of the moon and Mars. In the latter example, researchers say ancient subsurface environments on the Red Planet remain relatively unchanged the time when some believe the planet may have been habitable. These sheltered cavern areas, they write, “could provide sites for future human habitation.” 

In theory, future exploratory space robots could use a design like ReachBot’s to explore deeper into areas contemporary robots could find inaccessible. Elsewhere, researchers are exploring how three-legged jumping machines and four-legged, dog inspired robots could similarly help scientists learn more about undiscovered areas of our solar system neighbors. 

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Life may “find a way,” but how living things evolve is not a neat and orderly process. Instead of a tidy family tree with straight lines added for each new generation, the birth of a new species is much more tangled in reality. New research into one butterfly genus found in the Amazon shows just how entangled those evolutionary lines may be. Hybrids between some species can produce new butterfly species that are genetically distinct from both parent species and their earlier ancestors. The findings are described in a study published April 17 in the journal Nature. 

A third hybrid

In the study, the team focused on the brightly colored Heliconius genus of butterflies found in Central and South America. They are a common model for studying how butterfly wing patterns evolved due to the wide variety of wings within the group. In an 1861 letter to Charles Darwin, naturalist Henry Walter Bates referred to the Heliconius butterflies found in the Amazon as “a glimpse into the laboratory where Nature manufactures her new species.”

For a deeper look into Heliconius’ evolution, the team on this new study harnessed the power of whole-genome sequencing. All living organisms have DNA that is made of four nucleotide bases–adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. If you know the sequence of bases, you can identify the organism’s unique DNA fingerprint called a pattern. Sequencing determines these patterns and whole genome sequencing in a lab can determine the orders of these bases in one process.  

[Related: You might have more in common with the sea lamprey than you realize.]

The whole-genome sequencing indicated that a hybridization event occurred about 180,000 years ago between Heliconius melpomene and the ancestor of today’s Heliconius pardalinus butterflies. This event produced a third hybrid species called Heliconius elevatus. While it is descended from hybrids, H. elevatus is also a distinct butterfly species and has its own individual traits. These include color pattern, wing shape, flight characteristics, how they choose mates, and more. All three of these distinct species now fly together across a wide area of Amazon and indicate more evidence that hybrids are not always sterile as sometimes previously thought. 

“Historically, hybridization was thought of as a bad thing that was not particularly important when it came to evolution,” study co-author and Harvard University biologist Neil Rosser said in a statement. “But what genomic data have shown is that, actually, hybridization among species is widespread. Over the last 10 or 15 years, there’s been a paradigm shift in terms of the importance of hybridization and evolution.”

An evolutionary surprise

According to the team, this may alter how we view species and speciation. Scientists had generally believed that hybridization inhibited the generation of new species. Hybrid organisms are often born unhealthy or sterile and can’t reproduce, particularly when they are born with two different sex chromosomes. Most species are not perfectly intact tight units, but instead exchange a lot of DNA and can be considered “quite leaky.” The species that are evolving are actually exchanging genes constantly and it can trigger the evolution of new lineages. 

“Normally, species are thought to be reproductively isolated. They can’t produce hybrids that are reproductively fertile,” study co-author and Harvard University biologist James Mallet said in a statement. 

This is a different case for Heliconius  butterflies. They show that hybridization is not only occurring, but has driven the evolution of a new species in itself. While there is now evidence of hybridization between species, confirming if hybridization is involved in speciation has been difficult. 

[Related: Butterflies can remember specific flower foraging routes.]

“The question is: How can you collapse two species together and get a third species out of that collapse?” said Mallet.

This new research provides scientists with a next step in understanding how hybridization and speciation work in evolution. It could also help play a role in the planet’s biodiversity crisis, since fully understanding the question of what we really mean by “species” on a genetic level is important for conservation. It may also help in understanding the carriers of certain diseases. Multiple species of mosquitoes carry malaria, and while they are closely related, we still do not know how they interact or create new hybrids the way Heliconius butterflies do. 

As with evolution itself, this area of study will only continue to untangle as biologists learn more about what really makes a species a species. 

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Microscopic tardigrades have fascinated scientists for their incredible toughness since they were first discovered back in 1773. They can sense when it’s time to go dormant and enter a tun state under harsh conditions. Tardigrades can even withstand dangerous levels of radiation and a surprising mechanism in the DNA may be why. The process to repair DNA goes into overtime when exposed to the deadly radiation to fix the damaged DNA. The findings are described in a study published April 12 in the journal Current Biology.

“What we saw surprised us,” study co-author and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill biologist Bob Goldstein said in a statement. “The tardigrades are doing something we hadn’t expected.”  

Among the many dangers of excessive radiation exposure is its ability to damage DNA. In humans, the DNA damage from excessive radiation is linked to diseases including various cancers and cardiovascular disease. Tardigrade aka “water bears” can withstand an incredible amount of radiation. In 1963, researchers first discovered that they can survive 1,400 times more intense radiation than humans are known to live through. Now, scientists are getting a glimpse into how their bodies correct the radiation damage in DNA. 

[Related: What you need to know about the tardigrade cannon.]

In this new study, a team at UNC Chapel Hill used lab methods developed over the past 25 years to identify the internal genetic mechanisms tardigrades use to survive radiation exposure. They looked at a species of tardigrade called Hypsibius exemplaris that are not immune to DNA damage from radiation. Instead, they can repair this type of extensive damage. When they are exposed to radiation, tardigrade cells harness the power of hundreds of genes to create new proteins used to repair DNA. These proteins then ramp up the level of DNA repair to levels study co-author and biologist Courtney Clark-Hachtel called “ridiculous.”

“These animals are mounting an incredible response to radiation, and that seems to be a secret to their extreme survival abilities,” Clark-Hachtel said in a statement. “What we are learning about how tardigrades overcome radiation stress can lead to new ideas about how we might try to protect other animals and microorganisms from damaging radiation.”

[Related: We’ve seen how tardigrades walk, and it’s mesmerizing.]

As the UNC-Chapel Hill scientists completed the work, a team from France found similar results in their experiments. Museum of Natural History Paris researchers Jean-Paul Concordet and Anne de Cian and their colleagues found that while gamma rays shattered the DNA of the tardigrades, it didn’t kill them. They also discovered a new tardigrade protein called TRD1 that protects DNA. When it is put into human cells, the protein seems to help them withstand the damage. Concordet told The New York Times that TRD1 may grab onto the chromosomes and keep them in their correct shape, even as the chromosome strands start to fray. Understanding proteins like these can potentially lead to new treatments for cancer and other medical disorders where DNA is damaged. 

“Any tricks they use we might benefit from,” said Concordet. Concordet’s  findings were published as a reviewed preprint in the journal eLife in January. 

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As we wait for this spring and summer’s “cicadapocalypse,” when trillions will emerge across the Southern and Midwestern United States, some of the bugs may face a predicament that sounds straight out of science fiction. A sexually transmitted fungal pathogen exclusive to these periodical insects called Massospora cicadina can control them like “a puppet master.” It causes the infected cicadas to act hypersexual and infect other bugs before they eventually die.

Abdomens pierced open by a fungus

Massospora cicadina can affect both broods of periodical cicadas set to emerge in the coming weeks and months. Brood XIII–the Northern Illinois Brood–will emerge for the first time since 2007 and stretches across parts of Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and northern Illinois. Some of Brood XIX–the Great Southern Brood–will overlap with Brood XIII. The Great Southern Brood last emerged in 2011 and is primarily located in Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, George, North Carolina, South Carolina, and southern Illinois.

When they emerge, the cicadas molt into adults. Within a week to 10 days, this fungus opens up the backs of their abdomens. Scientists are still not sure when in their life cycle cicadas can initially become infected with Massospora cicadina, but the prevailing hypothesis is that they are infected on their way up from the ground. 

[Related: This parasite deploys mucus slime balls to make ‘zombie ants.’]

According to West Virginia University mycologist Matt Kasson, the infected cicadas look like they have “a gumdrop that’s gotten wet and dropped in chalk dust,” on them.

“If you look at a fungus infected cicada, you’ll see that basically, the backside of the body has been replaced by this chalky white fungal plug,” Kasson tells PopSci. “Now, if you or I had our abdomens pierced open by a fungus or a third of our body was replaced by some parasite, we probably wouldn’t feel well. We probably wouldn’t attempt to mate. We would just feel awful, lay down, and die.”

However, infected cicadas continue to fly around as if nothing is wrong with them even as their genitalia have been consumed by a fungus. They can do this because the fungus has sent them into a period of prolonged wakefulness–a time of increased stamina.

“A hypothesis for that prolonged wakefulness is that the fungus is producing an amphetamine called cathinone,” says Kasson. Kasson says it is similar to one of the synthetic stimulants commonly found in “illegal bath salts that were banned because of the aggressiveness that [they] would cause.” 

A quiet fungal ‘puppet master’

It makes the cicadas act hypersexualized, where males will continue to try to unsuccessfully mate with females and also mimic female behaviors to attract other males to mate with them. This then doubles the number of cicadas that will eventually become infected and is why it can be considered sexually transmitted. 

Massospora cicadina’s ability to keep the host alive long to maximize the number of cicadas infected makes it a biotroph. It does not work like the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus that takes over ants and makes them act like zombies or the fictional fungi from the television show and video game The Last of Us that pops out in a dramatic fashion. 

[Related: The Cicadapocalypse is nigh. 7 cicada facts to know before it hits.]

“It’s a trick of the fungus and it’s like a puppet master,” says Kasson. “It’s pulling the strings to maximize its own survival.”

Infection rates can reach 20 percent of a cicada if the environmental conditions are perfect, but some older studies suggest that it affects about five percent of cicadas in a given brood. 

Optimizing its genome

Massospora cicadina was first discovered in the mid to late 1800’s. Since periodical cicadas only emerge every 13 or 17 years, studying this fungus is difficult. It also can’t be cultured on a petri dish, so mycologists have a limited window to study them and are still not really sure where it comes from. 

In 2016, Brood V emerged near Kasson’s office in West Virginia and some of his graduate students suggested they look for signs of this fungus. They were able to sequence parts of its genome to see what makes it special. What they found was the largest genome ever sequenced for a fungus at about 1.5 billion bases.

“It’s about 20 times bigger than the average human genome and it’s mostly filled with these repetitive sequences called transposable elements,” says Kasson.

They indicate that Massospora cicadina has essentially spent millions of years optimizing its genome right alongside the cicada. The fungus and insect appear to have coevolved so that it can manipulate its host in a specific way to not kill it, but ensure its own survival. According to Kasson, their data on this coevolution hasn’t been published yet, but shows some interesting evolutionary dynamics. 

“What we see is a pattern where basically cicadas evolved in parallel to the fungus all together,” says Kasson. 

Massospora cicadina is not transmissible to humans, but  it would be smart to avoid eating any cicadas that have the white, chalky plugs on their abdomens. The infected bugs will not come with any sort of high or buzz, but do have several toxins that could be dangerous if eaten. 

“We found 1,000 other chemical compounds, some of which are known mycotoxins,” says Kasson. “So proceed with caution if you’re thinking about consuming one of these cicada fungi.”

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Tropical fruit-eating birds are so much more than just eye candy. These wildly colored avians are also a vital part of regenerating tropical forests. Data gathered on the ground in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil indicates that if birds like the red-legged honeycreeper, palm tanager, and toco toucan can move around more freely, carbon storage can increase by up to 38 percent. The findings are detailed in a study published April 15 in the journal Nature Climate Change. 

A crucial, but fragmented landscape

The Atlantic Forest in Brazil is one of the most biologically diverse regions in the world. It’s home to nearly seven percent of the world’s plant species and five percent of all vertebrates. This region is also one of Earth’s most fragmented tropical forests, due to deforestation, agriculture, and other human activities. Roughly 88 percent of its vegetation has been lost in the last 500 years, with only 12 percent of the original forest remaining in a patchwork of micro-forests. Many of these widely scattered forests are too far apart from one another to support bird movement.

Wild birds that eat a variety of fruits–or frugivores–can play a vital role in forest ecosystems by eating, excreting, and spreading seeds as they move around. Between 70 to 90 percent of the tree species living in tropical forests depend on seed dispersal from animals, as it allows the forests to grow and function.  

To combat this, 12 million hectares of land are targeted for restoration and natural recovery under the Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact. New data from this study is helpful for determining how to proceed. 

[Related: Three nations pledge to reverse decades of destruction in the rainforest.]

“This crucial information enables us to pinpoint active restoration efforts–like tree planting–in landscapes falling below this forest cover threshold, where assisted restoration is most urgent and effective,” Daisy Dent, a study co-author and naturalist at ETH Zurich, a public research university in Switzerland, said in a statement. 

Bigger birds, bigger seeds

In the study, the team compared the carbon storage potential that could be recovered in landscapes with limited forest fragmentation to the more splintered landscapes. They found that the  more fragmented landscapes restricted the bird’s movement and more tree cover was needed.

According to the team, a minimum of 40 percent forest cover is critical across the Atlantic Forest region for species diversity and also maintain and restore ecosystem services needed to maximize forest restoration efforts. These ecosystem services include carbon storage and seed dispersal.

Different bird species also have differing impacts in terms of seed dispersal. 

The smaller birds can spread more seeds around, but they can only carry the smaller seeds that have lower carbon storage potential. 

Larger larger birds like the toco toucan or the curl-crested jay can disperse the seeds of bigger trees with a higher carbon storage potential. However, the larger birds are less likely to move across more highly fragmented landscapes.

“Allowing larger frugivores to move freely across forest landscapes is critical for healthy tropical forest recovery,” study co-author and ETH Zurich ecologist and biologist Carolina Bello said in a statement. “This study demonstrates that especially in tropical ecosystems seed dispersal mediated by birds plays a fundamental role in determining the species that can regenerate.”

What can be done

Preventing the poaching of tropical birds is one strategy, as more birds flying around can translate into more trees.

“We have always known that birds are essential, but it is remarkable to discover the scale of those effects,” study co-author and ETH Zurich ecologist Thomas Crowther said in a statement. “If we can recover the complexity of life within these forests, their carbon storage potential would increase significantly.”

[Related: Songbirds near the equator really are hotter, color-wise.]

Earlier studies suggest that recovering these forests could capture more than 2.3 billion tonnes of carbon. Natural regeneration could also be more cost-effective than planting more trees, but both should be done. This enhances animal movement in the areas where a more passive restoration is more likely. In highly fragmented landscapes, active restoration like planting more trees is necessary. In order for these tree planting methods to be ecologically effective, ensuring that the trees actually belong in the area and not are not being planted in grasslands is important. 

[Related: When planting trees is bad for the planet]

“By identifying the thresholds of forest cover in the surrounding landscape that allow seed dispersal, we can identify areas where natural regeneration is possible, as well as areas where we need to actively plant trees, allowing us to maximize the cost-effectiveness of forest restoration,” study co-author and nature based solutions project manager Danielle Ramos, said in a statement. Ramos is affiliated with the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and the Universidade Estadual Paulista, in Rio Claro, São Paulo, Brazil.

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Get ready. Trillions of chirpy, red-eyed periodical cicadas are getting ready to emerge from underground in a rare double emergence event. These specific types of cicadas crawl out from below the ground every 13 or 17 years and can make as much noise as a jet engine.

While there are 3,400 known species of cicadas, only nine of them have the tendency to disappear underground then reemerge all at the same time. Seven of these nine periodical cicada spears are found in the United States. Even though it is not happening all across North America, it is still a huge natural event that’s worth keeping an eye on. 

[Related: This gnarly fungus makes cicadas hypersexual.]

“I would put the periodical cicadas as a natural phenomenon in the same category as April’s total solar eclipse,” Penn State University entomologist Michael Skvarla tells PopSci.

What is a brood of cicadas?

A brood is another term for a group of periodical cicadas that emerge every 13 or 17 years. Scientists use roman numerals to differentiate between various broods in North America. This year, Brood XIII (aka the Northern Illinois Brood) and Brood XIX (the Great Southern Brood) will emerge at the same time. 

The Northern Illinois Brood is a 17 year group and stretches across parts of Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and northern Illinois. The Great Southern Brood emerges every 13 years and is primarily located in Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, George, North Carolina, South Carolina, and importantly, southern Illinois.

[Related: Cicadas pee in jet streams like bigger animals.]

“This year is kind of special because we have the emergence of two broods,” says Skvarla. “ We have one 13 year brood and one 17 year brood emerging. Because they’re coming out every 13 or 17 years, they don’t sync up very frequently.”

When will they emerge?

They will start to emerge as soon as the surrounding soil has reached 64 degrees Fahrenheit. That usually occurs anytime between late April and June and the cicadas will stay around through July.

These cicadas hatched from eggs that were laid in 2011 and 2007. They fell from the trees as newborns and burrowed into the ground where they hunkered down and fed on xylem sap and tree roots as they grew. 

Where will the broods overlap?

The real “cicadapocalypse” will primarily affect the unlucky few in parts of Illinois where both broods will emerge simultaneously. 

Even though it is not happening all across North America, it is still a huge natural event. “I would put the periodical cicadas as a natural phenomenon in the same category as April’s total solar eclipse,” says Skvarla.

This type of overlap is also incredibly rare and has not occurred since 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president and had just purchased the Louisiana Territory from France.

[Related: Fiber optic cables can pick up cicadas’ droning din.]

What do they do when they emerge?

Cicadas come up to mate for several weeks and then die. The males send out their mating song by vibrating the small flaps on their abdomen called tymbals. Females will respond by flicking their wings. Eggs will be laid in trees and the hatchlings will burrow under the ground, beginning the whole process over again. 

Why do cicadas emerge on these strict schedules?

“The 13 and 17 year lifecycle is interesting, because both are prime numbers. We aren’t really sure why they’ve hit upon these prime number years,” says Skvarla. “There’s speculation that it might be because it’s harder for the broods to sync up the way that they’re doing this year.”

More synching up between broods could lead to less genetic diversity if interrelated bugs are mating with one another. Since they don’t emerge very often, it is difficult for scientists to study their peculiar calendars.

“You can spend your entire career and only see the same brood emerge two or three times,” said Sklarva. 

[Related: Baby Brood X cicadas are headed underground. What lies ahead is still a mystery.]

What do cicadas eat?

They spend their time underground munching on tree roots. They will not be destroying plants or crops when they emerge. 

Can you eat cicadas?

Yes, and there are several recipes that you can try.

“Cicadas kind of taste like shellfish like shrimp or lobster. It’s got kind of a crunchy, shrimpy flavor,” says Skvarla. “It doesn’t have the same consistency because cicadas have more shell and most recipes typically fry up the shell. With lobster or shrimp, you typically take the shell off.”

It is also not dangerous if your dog eats a few of them while out on a walk. 

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Earth used to be absolutely crawling with more megafauna. The fossil record is full of enormous birds like New Zealand’s Heracles inexpectatus, giant lemurs from Madagascar, large marine reptiles that would put today’s sea snakes to shame. Paleontologists have now found evidence of three unusual new species of giant fossil kangaroo in present day Australia and New Guinea. The creatures are described in a study published April 14 in the journal Megataxa and indicate that these species were likely much more diverse in terms of shape, range of habitat, and hopping method. 

“Living kangaroos are already such remarkable animals, so it’s amazing to think what these peculiar giant kangaroos could have been getting up to,” study co-author and Flinders University PhD student Isaac Kerr said in a statement.

Meet the giant kangaroos

The three new species belong to an extinct genus of giant kangaroos called Protemnodon that lived from five million to about 40,000 years ago. They would have looked somewhat similar to modern gray kangaroos, but were generally more squat and muscular. Some species were roughly 110 pounds, but others were up to twice as large as today’s biggest living kangaroos.

Protemnodon fossils are fairly common across Australia, but they have historically been found as individual bones instead of in complete skeletons. This has made it difficult for scientists to determine just how many species there were and how they differed in geographic range, movement, and size. 

[Related: What prehistoric poop reveals about extinct giant animals.]

“The fossils of this genus are widespread and they’re found regularly, but more often than not you have no way of being certain which species you’re looking at,” study co-author and Flinders University paleontologist Gavin Prideaux said in a statement. 

For this study, the team was able to use multiple complete fossilized kangaroo skeletons from Lake Callabonna in South Australia, which may help give scientists a more clear picture of these giant kangaroos. Researchers also reviewed all known species of Protemnodon and found that they were all quite different from one another. The animals also adapted to live in different environments and even had different methods of hopping. 

One very heavy, wayfaring kangaroo

One of the new species is named Protemnodon viator. The word viator means ‘traveler’ or ‘wayfarer’ in Latin. This wandering marsupial was also much bigger than other known giant kangaroos at weighing up to 374 pounds. According to the team, this is roughly twice as much as the largest living male red kangaroos. 

Protemnodon viator was also likely well-adapted to its arid central Australian habitat. It lived in a smaller geographic area than the red kangaroos of today. It was also long-limbed and could hop quickly and efficiently. 

A ‘robust’ creature and a swamp wallaby-like kangaroo

Another of the new species is named Protemnodon mamkurra and it connects the paleontologists of today with a famous scientist of the past. British paleontologist and naturalist Sir Richard Owen famously coined the term ‘dinosaur’ in 1842, but also described the first species of Protemnodon in 1874.

When he first found these giant kangaroo fossils, he followed a common scientific approach at the time. He mainly focused on fossilized teeth, seeing slight differences between the teeth of his specimens. He ultimately described six species of Protemnodon and further study chipped away at some of Owen’s early descriptions. He also suggested that some or all Protemnodon have four legs, While not all of them do, this study agrees that one of his species–Protemnodon anak–likely did have four legs. 

[Related: Giant beasts once roamed Madagascar. What happened to them?]

“However, our study suggests that this is true of only three or four species of Protemnodon, which may have moved something like a quokka or potoroo–that is bounding on four legs at times, and hopping on two legs at others,” Kerr said. “The newly described Protemnodon mamkurra is likely one of these. A large but thick-boned and robust kangaroo, it was probably fairly slow-moving and inefficient. It may have hopped only rarely, perhaps just when startled.”

The best of these fossil species comes from the Green Waterhole Cave in southeastern Australia, on the land of the Boandik people. The species name mamkurra, means ‘great kangaroo’ and was chosen by Boandik elders and language experts in the Burrandies Corporation.

According to Kerr, it is unusual for a single genus of kangaroo to live in such varied environments. “For example, the different species of Protemnodon are now known to have inhabited a broad range of habitats, from arid central Australia into the high-rainfall, forested mountains of Tasmania and New Guinea.”

The third new species is named Protemnodon dawsonae. It is known from fewer fossils than the other two, so it is more of a mystery. The team believes it was likely a moderate speed hopper and potentially similar to the living swamp wallaby. It was named in honor of Australian paleontologist Lyndall Dawson.

While most species became extinct about 40,000 years ago on mainland Australia, they potentially lived longer in New Guinea and Tasmania. Future studies could shed more light on their extinction, as it is still an enduring paleontological mystery. 

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For a moment, things weren’t looking great for the newest California condor chick. But thanks to some quick thinking and CT scanning technology, the San Diego Zoo welcomed its 250th hatchling in conservationists’ ongoing species recovery program. To celebrate, the wildlife park has released images and video of the moments leading up to the arrival of Emaay (pronounced “eh-my”), including a fascinating look within the egg itself.

When the California Condor Recovery Program began in 1982, only 22 of the critically endangered birds could be located. Since then, that number has grown over 560, with more than half of all California condors living in the wild. A big part of that success is thanks to the recovery program’s first adoptee, a three-month-old abandoned male named Xol-Xol (pronounced “hole-hole”). Xol-Xol, now 42, has fathered 41 chicks over his life, but his latest addition needed some extra care.

Zoologists placed the egg of the new chick in an incubator ahead of hatching, but noticed what appeared to be a malposition—a bodily angle that could have produced complications. The condor egg was then moved to the Paul Harter Veterinary Medical Center and placed in a computed tomography (CT) imaging machine.

CT scanning takes a series of X-ray readings of an object from different angles, combining them through computer programming to create “slices,” or cross-sectional scans. The scans allow for far more detailed results than a basic X-ray image. Thankfully, subsequent CT scans of the condor egg confirmed a false alarm, allowing the team to return it to its incubator. 

[Related: California condor hatches after bird flu deaths.]

Upon pipping (a chick’s initial cracking of its shell), conservationists transferred the egg into the nest of Xol-Xol and his partner, Mexwe, who helped complete the hatching process. On March 16, Emaay greeted the world, with Xol-Xol and Mexwe caring for it ever since.

Emaay is one of about 50 California condor hatchlings now birthed every year—around 12-15 of which occur in the wild. But as San Diego Zoo’s 250th newcomer—and whose father was the program’s first adoptee—Emaay is particularly special to the team.

“Reaching this milestone feels incredible,” Nora Willis, senior wildlife care specialist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, said. “There’s still a long way to go but being part of this and helping the species recover is life changing.”

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From a human perspective, chimpanzees and bonobos often represent two sides of our very nature. Chimpanzees are seen as more conflict ready. Bonobos are considered more peaceful, even demonstrating cooperation between groups. Some new research into both great ape species paints a more nuanced picture of both species and their behavior. Bonobos appear to be actually more aggressive than researchers previously thought within their own communities. The findings are described in a study published April 12 in the journal Current Biology.

“Chimpanzees and bonobos use aggression in different ways for specific reasons,” study co-author and Boston University anthropologist Maud Mouginot said in a statement. “The idea is not to invalidate the image of bonobos being peaceful—the idea is that there is a lot more complexity in both species.”

Pushing, biting, and chasing

In the study, the team focused in male aggression, which is often tied to reproduction. They analyzed three bonobo communities at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo and two chimpanzee communities at Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Researchers observed the behavior of 12 bonobos and 14 chimpanzees with a method called focal follows. This involves tracking one individual animal’s behavior for an entire day and noting how often the animal engaged in aggressive interactions, who they acted aggressively with, and whether or not they were physical. In great apes, these physical engagements included pushing, biting, or chasing an adversary. 

[Related: Popular chimpanzees set hand-holding trends for the whole group.]

“You go to their nests and wait for them to wake up and then you just follow them the entire day—from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep at night—and record everything they do,” said Mouginot.

They found that the male bonobos aggressive more frequently than chimpanzees. Overall, bonobos engaged in 2.8 times more aggressive interactions and three times as many physical aggressions than chimpanzees.

Bonobo males were also almost exclusively aggressive towards other males, while chimpanzees were more likely to be aggressive towards females. Chimpanzees were also more likely to use “coalitions” of males, with 13.2 percent of chimpanzee aggression and only one percent of bonobo aggressions featuring these groupings. 

The altercations involving groups of males can also cause more injuries and community infighting can potentially weaken the group’s ability to fight off different groups of chimpanzees. Bonobos do not appear to have this issue since most of their disputes are one on one. They have never been observed to kill one another and are not believed to be territorial, which leaves their communities more free to fight amongst themselves instead of outsiders. 

Male ‘coalitions’

The more aggressive males in both species also had greater mating success. The team was surprised to see this in bonobos because they have a co-dominant social dynamic where females often outrank males and can be more decisive with mates. Chimpanzees have male-dominated hierarchies, where these male coalitions coerce the females into mating.

“Male bonobos that are more aggressive obtain more copulations with females, which is something that we would not expect,” said Mouginot. “It means that females do not necessarily go for nicer males.”

The team notes that female bonobos and chimpanzees are not exactly passive, but that female aggression warrants its own future research.

The self-domestication hypothesis

These new findings of higher rates of male-male aggression in bonobos contradict a prevailing hypothesis in primate behavior called the self-domestication hypothesis. This idea that goes back as far as Charles Darwin posits that evolution has selected against aggression in bonobos and humans, but not chimpanzees. 

[Related: Primates have been teasing each other for 13 million years.]

Some of the findings do support some parts of the self-domestication hypothesis, specifically related to aggression towards females. Compared to chimpanzees, male bonobos direct less aggression towards females. According to the team, this aligns with earlier findings that male bonobos rarely use coercive mating strategies, even if they are physically larger.

The team could not assess the severity of aggressive interactions in terms of whether they caused wounds or injuries. They hope to collect this type of data in the future, along with comparing aggressive behavior that varies between communities and subspecies.

“I’d love to have the study complemented with comparable data from other field sites so we can get a broader understanding of variation within and between species,” said Mouginot.

The post ‘Peaceful’ bonobos bite and push each other, actually appeared first on Popular Science.

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Alethal, incurable malady similar to mad cow disease is sweeping across deer species in North America and starting to spread around the world. First identified in a single herd of captive mule deer in Colorado in 1967, chronic wasting disease—CWD—has now been found in captive and wild mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, moose and reindeer. It’s been found in 32 states and has crossed international boundaries into Canada, South Korea and Norway, among other countries.

The disease—caused by a rogue protein known as a prion—has not yet been shown to infect humans, though fears remain. But even if that never happens, CWD could kill off large numbers of deer and possibly wipe out individual populations. Wildlife management agencies may, in turn, introduce stricter hunting rules, and the fear of contaminated meat could scare away potential hunters, affecting the United States’ roughly $23 billion deer hunting industry.

Since CWD’s emergence, scientists have been working to understand the disease and how it might be brought under control. Over the years, three potential mitigation strategies have emerged, but each has significant challenges. Nicholas Haley, a veterinary microbiologist at Midwestern University in Arizona, coauthored an overview of chronic wasting disease in the 2015 Annual Review of Animal Biosciences and has been working on the problem ever since. Knowable Magazine spoke with Haley about the options and whether we can ever contain the disease.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s a prion disease?

CWD isn’t caused by a bacterium or virus, but by a naturally occurring protein in our cells twisting out of shape.

The Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat’s Cradle describes the discovery of a new form of ice, ice-nine, which is solid even at room temperature. In the book, when ice-nine touches water, it forces all the other water to crystalize in the same way, until all the water on Earth is frozen. That’s kind of what’s happening in the body. An animal gets exposed to the prion, usually through ingesting it, and anywhere in the body that the prion encounters the normal version of itself, the abnormal protein convinces the normal protein to take this misfolded shape.

This is particularly dangerous in the central nervous system, because these proteins can build up into plaques that kill the cell. Eventually, enough cells die that you get nervous system disorders. The animal begins to behave oddly and eventually dies.

In the meantime, the sick animal can spread the prions to other animals through things like its saliva, urine or feces. The prions are very hardy and can stick around on plants or in the soil until another animal comes along and eats them.

Could we just kill all the sick animals before they can spread the disease further?

Unfortunately, that only really works if it’s done early enough. It’s like a wildfire—the sooner you can put it out, the more chance you have of keeping it from spreading. But if you let CWD fester for any length of time, then culling probably won’t work.

New York State, for example, did a huge culling operation in Oneida County back in 2005 after they identified five or six CWD-positive deer for the first time. That seems to have worked, and the state still tests animals for the disease to try to catch those outbreaks early.

But when wildlife managers tried localized culling in Colorado, it didn’t seem to affect CWD over the long term, possibly because the infectious protein had been in the area for so long that it essentially became baked into the landscape. The protein is incredibly stable and can exist in the soil for years. Or new, sick deer may have moved into the now vacant area from nearby populations. Deer aren’t symptomatic until the later stages of the disease, but they’re likely shedding the prion into the environment some time before then.

So if culling is really effective only early on, are there other strategies that can help in places where CWD is already “baked in”?

My work is largely focused on breeding CWD-resistant animals—not curing the disease, but trying to find animals that don’t get sick as easily. We’re working with a deer farm used for hunting. They have a few properties, representing about 600 to 800 deer, where CWD has become common. We first identified CWD there in 2014, and within a few years a deer on one of those properties had about a 60 to 70 percent chance to be positive for CWD.

We also did genetic testing on the animals. We found that something like 80 to 90 percent of the deer had one particular genetic variant, or allele, of the prion protein that seems incredibly susceptible to infection. But that’s only one allele out of about five possible ones in deer. And it seems like some alleles are more resistant to CWD than others.

Why?

It’s like a lock and key. The infectious CWD prion is a very good key for that one really common lock, but with different alleles, the lock is subtly different, and the key doesn’t work as well. We’re still learning exactly how it all interacts, though.

Over time, we started to focus on two different “good” alleles. I think our end goal is to use artificial insemination and other breeding practices until we have a population of animals with just the good alleles, eliminating the one we know is terrible.

Would having only animals with good alleles stop the spread?

It could make it manageable. The animals with those good gene variants are significantly less likely to get CWD, but they’re likely not completely immune. We’ve been putting more of the animals with good variants out into the farm and can see that fewer of them seem to be getting infected by the time they’re hunted—on one property where we’ve introduced a lot of selectively bred deer, we haven’t found a positive case in the past two, if not three, years.

So selective breeding might work like the Covid vaccine: It’s still possible to get a breakthrough infection, but it’s had a huge impact on slowing the disease down and minimizing transmission. And at that point, there may be management tools we could use to keep it at essentially zero. If it takes these highly resistant animals five years to get sick, but they’re all being hunted by the age of three, then eventually we won’t have any CWD, for example.

Could selective breeding work for wild animals as well, not just captive ones?

That’s a really good question. This kind of selection is happening naturally in wildlife—natural selection will favor resistant animals over time—but it’s much slower. I could see the release of captive-raised animals happening in controlled situations, such as where CWD has completely wiped out a local population. But just putting one or two bucks out onto the landscape—their genes would get diluted pretty quick.

And while there are precedents for breeding animals on a farm and releasing them into the wild, a lot of wildlife professionals are heavily against that. They want to keep wild populations wild. To introduce farm deer would taint it, in a way. And it’s something you can’t walk back. I understand that perspective. A lot of wild animal folks are putting more hope into vaccine research instead.

I know we have vaccines against viruses, but is it possible to make a vaccine against a protein?

We already do. The Covid vaccine is specifically against the spike protein of the Covid-19 virus, for example, not the virus as a whole. And prions are just other proteins. So a vaccine could theoretically work, creating antibodies that can bind to the prion protein, helping the body recognize and eliminate it.

But the problem with chronic wasting disease is that, unlike Covid, a healthy version of the problem protein already exists naturally inside our bodies. Trying to develop a vaccine that can target the unhealthy version of the protein while not attacking your healthy cells, that’s the challenge.

The way the disease works in the body might also make creating a vaccine harder. Researchers in Wyoming did some vaccine trials and found that when elk were injected with a particular experimental vaccine, they got sick faster.

What we think might have happened was this: White blood cells will naturally kill invaders and take the remains back to lymph nodes to teach the body what they saw, and activate defenses. Getting a vaccine can speed up this process by making the white blood cells better at detecting and picking up invaders.

But the problem is, in this case, that the white blood cells couldn’t destroy the prion after they picked it up. It was still infectious. So all they did was more quickly bring the prion to somewhere where it could spread, like ants bringing poison back to the nest and spreading it to others.

That isn’t to say it’d be impossible for vaccines to work, and there are groups working on the problem. I want to be optimistic. I just have reservations about it.

Also, even if we get an effective vaccine, we’d also need to figure out a good way to distribute it. It’d be impractical to use an injection on wild animals. There is a baited rabies vaccine that’s been used in the eastern United States that can be dropped out of a plane. Hypothetically, something like that could work for CWD. But there’s a lot of things that we’d have to overcome.

So overall, what do you see as the outlook in terms of managing and containing CWD?

It depends a lot on how people react. Unfortunately, states’ responses have been varied. Some take it very seriously, but some states try to sweep things under the rug. I’m expecting that, within our lifetime, it’ll be in every state in the United States except for Hawaii.

And then what? Do you think this will eventually go away? Or are we just going to have to live with it?

I think it’ll be like Covid. It won’t ever go away. It may not be as big of a deal in 100 years, but it’ll still be there.

And fingers crossed it never jumps into humans?

Yeah, well, cross your fingers harder.

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

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The Earth’s octopuses have been around for at least 330 million years. While they evolved before dinosaurs roamed the planet, their present day descendents don’t live for very long. They generally die soon after mating or laying eggs, with some octopus species living only six months and the average living about two to three years. Some species like the giant Pacific octopus can live up to five years at most. 

To keep fish populations sustainable, fisheries must ensure that enough breeding individuals are either left alone or released back into the wild. Government agencies can enforce catch laws, while scientists can inform laws by understanding the breeding lives of various fish. For octopuses, their short lifespans have been okay on an evolutionary level. However, as human taste for these cephalopods grows, it’s become a problem to meet demand. 

In an effort to protect the longevity of this incredibly old and smart sea creature while ensuring that octopus fisheries remain sustainable, a team of scientists in Australia have created the first known step-by-step guide for determining the age of an octopus. The guide is detailed in a paper published April 11 in the Marine and Freshwater Research Journal and offers a first step in creating guidelines for fishers to follow and ensure that they are catching octopuses that are not of breeding age.

There are a few ways to tell how old an organism is–a process called aging. Trees famously have rings that indicate how many years they have been living. Examining teeth and bone structure in mammals also can reveal similar information about age. That process has been a little bit tricky for octopuses. In the new paper, the team looked at their beaks and stylets–internal shells located near their gills. They pinpointed the growth rings similar to tree’s are located here and are a useful tool to validate the age of an octopus.

[Related: Octopuses rewrite their own RNA to survive freezing temperatures.]

“Over the past 30 years, various studies have explored different methods to age octopus, but only a small number of researchers worldwide have the hands-on knowledge to execute these methods in the laboratory,” study co-author and University of South Australia marine ecologist Zoe Doubleday said in a statement. “It’s critical that we don’t lose this practical scientific knowledge because by determining their age, we can understand the impact of different rates of fishing on the population.”

The team explains how scientists can examine an octopus’ beak, stylets, and growth rings in the lab to determine how old the animal is. In the future, these methods could then be applied in the wild to get a sense of how old octopuses living in the ocean are.

“Understanding an octopus’s age helps to keep fisheries sustainable,” study co-author and University of South Australia PhD student Erica Durante said in a statement. “If you know a species’ age, you can estimate how fast they grow and reproduce and how much you can catch to keep a fishery sustainable.”

[Related: Eating seafood can be more sustainable and healthy than red meat.]

Age data can also tell scientists how long it takes for an animal to mature. This way, octopuses that have not matured enough to breed can be avoided when fishing. According to Durante, age is important for the general conservation and management of a species, whether or not it is commercially fished. 

One tricky part is that while growth rings on trees represent years, the growth rings on octopus represent days. According to the team, these methods will need to be customized for each of the roughly 300 known species of octopus. The team also acknowledges that these guidelines will continue to evolve as we learn more about the lives of these multi-legged creatures.

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A green sea turtle believed to be up to 95 years young was given a clean bill of health this week. Myrtle the ancient green sea turtle has been at Boston’s New England Aquarium for more than 50 years and shows no signs of slowing down, despite being in the upper levels of her life expectancy.

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

Turtles and tortoises are well known for their longevity. Depending on the species, they can live anywhere from 25 to 200 years. In December 2023, a tortoise named Jonathan celebrated his 191st birthday and is currently the oldest known tortoise. According to Guinness World Records, the previous oldest known tortoise was a radiated tortoise named Tu’i Malila. British explorer Captain James Cook presented Tu’i Malila to the royal family of Tonga sometime around around 1777. Tu’i Malila died in 1965 at the estimated age of 188.

Myrtle still has a ways to go to live up to the standards set by Jonathan and Tu’i Malila, so physical exams like this one can help veterinarians keep her healthy. To perform this semi-annual reptilian check-up, veterinarians first had to get Myrtle into an underwater crate and hoist all 500-plus pounds of her from her home in the aquarium’s Giant Ocean Tank. Once she was safely removed from the tank, a team of trained veterinarians, vet technicians, and aquarists drew blood, checked her flippers, and made sure her mouth, nose, and eyes were all working properly. She then received an ultrasound, hopped on the scale, and was returned to her tank. 

All of this was done while the aquarium was open to visitors, who assured onlookers that the veterinarians were trained professionals safe from Myrtle’s powerful jaws. Her serrated teeth are  likely strong enough to crush grass and some small hard shelled organisms.

According to ocean tank manager Mike O’Neill, she is “in robust condition,” despite her age. Myrtle is thought to be up to 95 years old, which would place her just beyond the upper boundaries of the species’ longevity. 

“There’s every reason to believe Myrtle will stick around for years to come,” O’Neill told the Associated Press. “She is iconic. One of the really special things we see is parents with their kids who say, ‘This is Myrtle, she has been here since when I was a kid.’ She has this multigenerational impact, which is really special.”

Since first arriving from an aquarium in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1970, Myrtle has been visited by roughly 50 million patrons. According to the New England Aquarium, she has gotten quite used to humans in that time and enjoyed having her schell scratched and eats up to six and a half pounds of food per day. She currently shares her space with tankmates Carolina and Retreat. These loggerhead sea turtles are about half her age and size. The loggerheads also received physicals and are also doing well, according to O’Neill.   

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

The second-largest species of sea turtle, green sea turtles live in tropical and subtropical oceans all over the world. The United States is home to six species of native sea turtles–green, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, leatherback, loggerhead, and olive ridley. They primarily feast upon algae and seagrass. 

All six sea turtle species in the US are protected by the Endangered Species Act, with green sea turtles listed as endangered and decreasing in population by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recommends reducing marine debris, not releasing balloons that often end up polluting the ocean, leaving turtle nests alone, and keeping these areas dark at night as some small steps to better protect sea turtles. 

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Heads up: The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week has been nominated for a Webby! You can vote to help us win the Webby People’s Voice Award. Click here to vote by April 18! 

FACT: ADHD may have evolved to make us better at picking berries 

By Rachel Feltman

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania recently released a study on the potential evolutionary benefits of ADHD. They analyzed data from 457 adults who played an online foraging game, where the objective was to collect as many berries as possible within an eight minute span.

Players could choose to either keep collecting berries from the bushes in their original location, or move to a new patch. (By the way, this sounds an awful lot like a game I used to play on Neopets!) Moving would cost them a brief time out, and there was no guarantee that the patch would have as many berries as their current location, but the number of berries you could get from each bush went down each time you foraged it again. 

Along with the game, subjects also took a survey designed to assess whether they had symptoms of ADHD. This didn’t constitute a full or formal diagnosis, but it screened for traits like having difficulty concentrating. 

When the researchers compared the survey results with the game play stats, they found that people with ADHD symptoms played differently—and more effectively—than their peers. They were more likely to move on to another bush, and collected an average of 602 berries compared with 521. 

I probably don’t need to tell you that this isn’t exactly a perfect model for actual foraging. The researchers do hope to do a similar experiment in the future involving in-person foraging, where they’d use people with formal ADHD diagnoses as their experimental subjects, but that would obviously be a much more complicated experiment to run. 

But this isn’t the first research to suggest that ADHD traits and other types of neurodiversity might have evolved to help our ancestors survive. Other studies have examined the differences in how people with ADHD search for information or objects and found that we spend more time in the “explore” phase of foraging versus the “exploit” phase. There’s even ongoing research to suggest that kids with ADHD are less susceptible to inattention bias.

In 2008, researchers found that members of a nomadic group in Kenya who had gene mutations associated with ADHD were in better health than average, while those same mutations were associated with malnourishment in closely related people who lived as farmers. There’s a broad idea known as the hunter versus farmer hypothesis that covers this phenomenon. The idea is that the hyperfocus associated with ADHD was actually a really useful trait back when humans spent their days hunting and foraging. It’s much less useful useful in agrarian and industrialized life. One 1998 study found that adults with self-reported ADHD were much better able to postpone eating, sleeping, and other personal needs to absorb themselves in an urgent task, like a last-minute deadline. That’s a mindset that would have come in handy for unpredictable food acquisition, like the sudden appearance of a herd of mammoths or an unexpected bounty of berries.

Some researchers have even suggested that sugar can trigger hyperactivity symptoms because the fructose makes our brains think we’ve come across a foraging bounty and should search for more berries.

While there’s a lot more research to be done on this subject, this study is an important reminder that our current sense of what’s “good” and what’s “normal” is pretty arbitrary—and that reframing these ideas can unlock really cool insights into why humans actually are the way they are. And at least according to some foragers, these findings are no surprise at all. 

FACT: Venus is Earth’s evil twin

By Knimbley

Join me as I embark on a fascinating journey into the depths of Venus’s mysteries. From Elden Ring’s DLC to Venus’s mythological allure and its longstanding status as a scientific enigma, my contribution to this week’s episode dances between realms of curious tangents, genderfluid anatomy, and fantasy. As we explore Venus’s dual nature and delve into the origins of stories both factual and fictional, listeners are invited to ponder the cosmic wonders that await us beyond Earth’s confines (and hopefully are unveiled within the Shadow of the Erdtree). With warmth and perhaps too much matcha, we navigate the intersection of myth and science, embracing the magic of exploration.

If you’re hungry for some more Venus-related science after this week’s episode, check out NASA’s content on the subject:

FACT: People think this lotion attracts spiders en masse—but the truth is more complicated than that 

By Jess Boddy

At the end of last year, people were all in a tizzy because of the lotion spiders. Yes, the lotion spiders. Someone left a review on Sephora’s website about a specific kind of lotion: the Delícia Drench body butter made by the company Sol de Janeiro. Here’s that review.

This wasn’t the only review that said this lotion attracted spiders—there were a handful. And then, the unspeakable happened… People posted the reviews to Reddit. Word of lotion spiders spread like wildfire. Folks started doing their own home “experiments,” putting the lotion on tissues and watching to see if spiders appeared. Pretty much everyone came to the same conclusion: this lotion attracts wolf spiders. 

However, scientists aren’t so sure. Listen to this week’s episode to find out the scientific truth about this potentially spider-attracting beauty product—and if there are others to avoid if you have a fear of arachnids. (Spoiler: It’s complicated.)

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Best overall		TUG 360°		SEE IT	This leash offers a solid value with all the necessary features.
Best tape		Flexi Comfort		SEE IT	Having more than one dog doesn’t have to mean lugging more gear, with two color-coded leashes in one.
Best for large dogs		KONG Ultimate		SEE IT	For bigger breeds, this leash can support up to 150 pounds.

There’s nothing quite like going on a jaunt with your pooch, and the right retractable dog leash can strike a perfect balance between security and freedom. A trusted lead maximizes the safety of your dog-walking experience. We curated this list of the best retractable dog leashes to help make the most of your adventures with the pooch and something durable, dependable, and comfortable in your hand. 

We chose models popular because you can release your dog’s distance up to 26 feet in some cases (the most common length is about 16 feet). This allows your dog less confinement and more freedom of movement to sightsee as they get their daily steps in. However, because they allow more freedom, you must ensure the brake-and-lock system is up to par. A lock button on the handle controls how much of the leash is extended or retracted at any given time. Some even come with reflective stitching for low-light conditions. There are many leashes to choose from, but for those who love the freedom of a retractable design, here are five of the best retractable dog leashes to get the most out of your daily strolls. 

• Best overall: TUG 360°
• Best tape: flexi New Comfort
• Best chew-proof: PUPTECK Retractable Dog Leash with Anti-Chewing Steel Wire
• Best for large dogs: KONG Ultimate

How we chose the best retractable dog leashes

To find the best retractable dog leashes, we considered dozens of models from several manufacturers. We relied on research, published reviews, and some hands-on experience to find leashes that were both safe and reliable over a long period of time. We looked for models that have solid reputations above all else because failure out in the real world can be catastrophic for you and your pooch. We favored models that can accommodate many breeds with the necessary features for controlling a pup’s movements on the street. Added features like a hook for carrying bags provide nice touches to round out the offerings.

The best retractable dog leashes: Reviews & Recommendations

There are a lot of dog leashes, including these lengthy tethers, out there. And one thing is for sure: There’s nothing worse than a leash that snaps or breaks, so we’ve collected trusted brands known for their durable, long-lasting products. Beyond the actual retractable dog leashes being sturdy, our top picks ensure you get a burly handle that won’t fall apart if it’s dropped or bangs against a hard object.

Best overall: TUG 360° Tangle-Free Retractable Dog Leash

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Why it made the cut: This extremely durable retractable dog leash is both lightweight and strong for a wide range of dog sizes and strengths and clocks in at under $20, making it the best retractable dog leash overall. 

Specs

• Length: 16 ft
• Sizes: Tiny, Small, Med, Large
• Tangle-free: Yes

Pros

• Lightweight yet extremely durable
• Ergonomic grip handle
• Consistent positive customer feedback
• Safety features
• Range of sizes

Cons

• Not chew-proof

With tons of positive user reviews, a thoughtful set of features, and a very affordable price, the Tug Tangle-Free won us over for the best retractable dog leash overall. A 16-foot, tangle-free, 360-degree movement tape leash with their signature Quick Lock and Brake System ensures your dog follows your lead. 

Reviewers note that the handle is comfortable and wide enough for larger hands, and the wider strap is more durable than previous models for pullers or hyperactive pups. Sizes range from Tiny to Large, for tiny dogs to hefty fur-babies. 

Best tape: Flexi New Comfort Retractable Tape Dog Leash

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Why it made the cut: Flexi has been making a version of this leash for 50 years, which speaks to its success.

Specs

• Length: Up to 26 ft
• Sizes: XS-XL
• Tangle-free: Yes

Pros

• 50-year history in dog leashes
• Customizable (LED lighting, multi box, etc)
• Safety features 
• Extra long tape that won’t jam

Cons

• Some reviewers report snapping
• Not the cheapest option

Looking for the best Petsmart dog leash for your next trip to the store? This Flexi leash is one of the best in the market for tape models, featuring an adjustable handle, brake and lock buttons, and an ergonomically designed handle for comfortable walking. 

It can also be customized with its own LED Lighting System for added safety and protection in low light. Sixteen feet of tape is protected by the tape guidance system, which ensures that your tape won’t get jammed during walks or as it retracts.

One of the main reasons to choose a Flexi leash is the brand name itself. Flexi invented the retractable lead 50 years ago and has been refining it ever since.

Best chew-proof: PUPTECK Retractable Dog Leash with Anti-Chewing Steel Wire

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Why it made the cut: With 15 inches of chew-proof steel wire, this retractable dog leash promises to keep your munch-happy pups from chewing through their lead.

Specs

• Length: 16 ft
• Chew-Proof: Yes
• Weight: Up to 110 lbs

Pros

• Lightweight chew-proof wire 
• Reflective strip for low visibility conditions
• Can handle up to 110 lbs
• Ergonomic handle

Cons

• Some reviewers wished for more wire coverage
• Retraction mechanism is slow

For dogs who will munch on anything, this 16-foot chew-proof retractable dog leash from Puptek features 15 inches of detachable chew-proof steel wire rope. Compared to alternative stainless steel rope, the wire design rope is overall lighter making it a more user-friendly experience when going for long walks and the best chew-proof retractable dog leash.

The tangle-free rope can bear up to 110 pounds and features black webbing with a reflective strip attached to it, so night walks are safer and more visible to passing cars. The only downside here is some reviewers wished the chew-proof steel covered more of the leash. This would, indeed, create a heavier lead but would ensure that your pup couldn’t chew through any part of the tape. 

Best for large dogs: KONG Ultimate Retractable Dog Leash

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Why it made the cut: Extra durable, extra rugged, and extra powerful dog leash for dogs up to 150 lbs, suitable for most large dog breeds like Pit Bulls, Mastiffs, and Rottweilers. 

Specs

• Length: 16 ft
• Reflective: Yes
• Weight: Up to 150 lbs

Pros

• Very durable
• Suitable for up to 150 lbs
• Reflective stitching for safety
• Dependable; long-lasting

Cons

• Some reviewers don’t like the forward placement of the lock button
• More expensive end of models
• No keyring slot or holder for poop bags

You shouldn’t have to lift heavy weights to be able to walk your Pitbull or another strong breed. This dog leash is for those hefty pups that require super durable and extra-strength leashes. The Ultimate Kong leash—made by the trusted manufacturer of some of our favorite dog toys—may be rugged and sturdy, but the ergonomic and soft grip handle with added grip support keeps it easy and breezy for the pet owner to maintain total control of their large dog. 

You can use this Kong leash for dogs up to 150 pounds, comparable to a Mastiff, American bulldog, or Leonberger. It also comes color-coordinated with reflective stitching for added safety, which you’ll need with those heavy pullers in low-light conditions. We would have liked a keyring slot for a baggie holder, but that’s not a dealbreaker.

What to look for in the best retractable dog leashes

Type 

There are a few types of retractable dog leashes: nylon, tape, and chew-proof designs with steel wiring. It depends on your needs, but we don’t recommend nylon for tough or heavy dogs as they can more easily snap or break. Go for a chew-proof with wiring if your dog is prone to chewing.

Brake settings

Ensure you can easily brake or lock to have optimal control over your dog while walking. Since the lead can be up to 26 feet, this is supremely important for safety. Plus, most leashes recommend you don’t let the dog hit the end of its range because that puts excess stress on the mechanism.

Weight limit

This is very important so your leash doesn’t snap or break, especially with pullers. Be sure to read the product information to ensure your leash can handle your dog’s weight capacity.  Most will offer a weight range that the product can withstand. 

Comfort

An ergonomic grip handle is important for your comfort, especially for long walks. 

Tangle-free design

Most good brands will have tangle-free designs to ensure you’re not spending precious walking time untangling a lead. Leashes typically achieve this feat by shaping the opening through which the leash comes out of the mechanism and attaching to the dog’s collar with rotating hooks that spin freely. 

FAQs

Final thoughts about the best retractable dog leashes

• Best overall: TUG 360°
• Best tape: flexi New Comfort
• Best chew-proof: PUPTECK Retractable Dog Leash with Anti-Chewing Steel Wire
• Best dual leash: Wigzi Dual Doggie
• Best for large dogs: KONG Ultimate

Finding the best retractable dog leash for you depends on various factors: your dog’s weight, strength, and habits (like chewing through everything in their path). Choosing the wrong one can end in disaster, and your best friend deserves better than that. Plus, if you have a leash you and your pup enjoy, you’re more likely to get out there and have adventures. 

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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Dolphins and other toothed whales–or Odontocetes–use their heads to create sounds that help them communicate, navigate, and hunt in their murky marine world. These sometimes vocal-fry-like sounds reveal information about their murky marine world that is critical for survival. Some new genetic analysis suggests that the collections of fatty tissues that enable echolocation in toothed whales may have evolved from their skull muscles and bone marrow,changing how these animals eat and sense the world around them. The findings are described in a study published in the April 2024 issue of the journal Gene. 

Toothed whales include numerous dolphin species as well as orcas, sperm whales, belugas, and narwhals. Echolocation produced by a bulbous mass of fat tissue inside of their heads called the melon. 

Alongside of the jawbone of dolphins and toothed whales is a group of sound producing extramandibular fat bodies (EMFB). Another set of acoustic fat deposits called the intramandibular fat bodies (IMFB) are located inside the jawbone. The evolution of the melon, the extramandibular, and intramandibular fat bodies was critical for echolocation to develop in these marine mammals. However, little is known about how these fatty tissues themselves originated genetically. 

“Toothed whales have undergone significant degenerations and adaptations to their aquatic lifestyle,” Hayate Takeuchi, a study co-author and PhD student at Hokkaido University in Japan,  said in a statement. 

One of these adaptations was the partial loss of their sense of smell and taste, alongside the gain of echolocation. To look closer at this and other adaptations at a genetic level, the team from Hokkaido University studied DNA sequences of genes that are expressed in these acoustic fat bodies. They measured the gene expressions in harbor porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) and Pacific white-sided dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens). 

[Related: This dolphin ancestor looked like a cross between Flipper and Moby Dick.]

They found that the genes which are normally associated with muscle function and development were active in the melon and EMFB’s on the outside of the jawbone. There was also evidence of an evolutionary connection between this fat and a muscle called the masseter muscle. In humans, the masseter muscle connects the lower jawbone to the cheekbones and is one of the the key muscles used in chewing.

“This study has revealed that the evolutionary tradeoff of masticatory muscles for the EMFB—between auditory and feeding ecology—was crucial in the aquatic adaptation of toothed whales,” study co-author and genome scientist and evolutionary biologist Takashi Hayakawa said in a statement. “It was part of the evolutionary shift away from chewing to simply swallowing food, which meant the chewing muscles were no longer needed.”

[Related: We finally know how baleen whales make noise.]

When the team analyzed the gene expression in the intramandibular fat on the inside of the jawbone, they found active genes related to some elements of immune response and regulation of a group of white blood cells that fight infection called T cells. The team believes that this is due to its proximity to bone marrow–which helps produce T cells–and requires more study.

The team also credited the Stranding Network Hokkaido as another important aspect of the research, as the samples used in this study were collected by them. The organization has  collected specimens of stranded whales along the seashore and river mouth in Hokkaido. Performing necropsies on stranded marine mammals have been critical for sampling and research to learn more about the potential causes of strandings and death, but also anatomy, physiology, and evolution. 

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Worm bodies might not seem all that interesting. However, a closer look can also reveal how some worms use extra appendages to move through the water like “magic carpets,” while others detach their butts to procreate. Scientists have now discovered that a type of bristle worm is equipped with a complex vision system dominated by two really big eyes.

The Vanadis bristle worm’s eyes can potentially use ultraviolet (UV) light to communicate and find mates and/or food, which has not been well documented or studied in nature. The worms could also be among the only known bioluminescent animals that use UV light to glow. The findings are described in a study published April 8 in the journal Current Biology. 

Meet Vanadis bristle worms

The Vanadis bristle worms in this study are found around the island of Ponza, in the Mediterranean Sea west of Naples, Italy. It is a member of a family of large-eyed bristle worms called polychaeta. They are about six inches long and primarily eat plankton, algae, and bits of organic matter from dead organisms. As a pair, the worm’s eyes weigh about 20 times as much as the rest of the worm’s head, and appear like two giant red orbs are strapped to its body. If human eyes are as proportionally large, we would need to carry around roughly 220 extra pounds.  Since the worms are nocturnal and disappear when the sun is out, scientists wondered what they do with their eyes after and what they are used for.

[Related: How do animals see the world?]

In the study, a team from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, Lund University in Sweden, and Tuscia University in Italy examined three species of bristle worms that they collected by hand in shallow water. They brought them back to a lab, where they analyzed their eyes in close detail. The team found that Vanadis’ eyesight is better and more advanced than previously believed. Its eyes can see very small objects and track their movements, despite having a more simple nervous system.

A ‘secret language’–for mating

The team is still trying to figure out how they evolved such sharp eyesight. The worms’ bodies  are transparent, except for their eyes that need to register light to work properly. This means that they can’t be inherently transparent, so their eyes becoming visible must come with some evolutionary trade-offs. Some aspects about having a transparent body with visible eyes must have had evolutionary benefits that outweigh the consequences.

What the worms gain remains unclear partially because they do not come out during the day, when eyes typically work best. 

“No one has ever seen the worm during the day, so we don’t know where it hides. So, we cannot rule out that its eyes are used during the day as well,” University of Copenhagen marine and neurologist Anders Garm said in a statement. “What we do know is that its most important activities, like finding food and mating, occur at night. So, it is likely that this is when its eyes are important.”

[Related: Microscopic worms use electricity to ride bumblebees like EVs.]

The team believes that part of the explanation is that these worms can see different wavelengths of light than humans can. Like many birds, reindeer, and other more complex organisms, the worm’s vision can see UV light that is invisible to the human eye. This could indicate that the purpose of the eyes is to see bioluminescent signals in the pitch-black night time sea. Bioluminescence occurs when organisms can produce light on their own. Glow-worms are a famous example that use certain chemicals to produce light within their bodies. 

“We have a theory that the worms themselves are bioluminescent and communicate with each other via light. If you use normal blue or green light as bioluminescence, you also risk attracting predators,” said Garm. “But if instead, the worm uses UV light, it will remain invisible to animals other than those of its own species. Therefore, our hypothesis is that they’ve developed sharp UV vision so as to have a secret language related to mating.”

The worms also may need to be on the lookout for UV bioluminescent prey. Regardless of what it is used for, the Vanadis worm could become the first animal proven to naturally create UV bioluminescence to communicate, according to Garm.

Robotics research and evolutionary debates

The team has begun working with robotics researchers from the University of Southern Denmark to investigate how to better understand the mechanism behind these eyes well enough to translate it into technology.

“Together with the robotics researchers, we are working to understand how animals with brains as simple as these can process all of the information that such large eyes are likely able to collect,” said Garm. “This suggests that there are super smart ways to process information in their nervous system. And if we can detect these mechanisms mathematically, they could be integrated into computer chips and used to control robots.”

Beyond robotics, their eyes could also help settle a heavy debate around evolutionary theory. Did eyes only evolve once into every form we know today or have they arisen several times in evolutionary history?

Vanadis has eyes that are built relatively simply, but have very advanced functions. They have simultaneously evolved in only a few million years–a relatively short span of time in terms of evolution. These worm eyes likely developed independently of more complex eyes like humans, and could help prove that the development of vision is possible over a relatively short time.

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Amphibians are known for their bright colors and their low and bellowing croaks that often announce when it is going to rain. Other frogs may make sounds that humans can’t even hear. These sounds are also potentially pretty violent. A study published April 4 in the journal Acta Ethologica describes how some amphibians in South America potentially emit sounds on the ultrasound spectrum to defend themselves against predators. 

Ultrasound in nature are sounds that are created at an ear-piercingly high frequency that is inaudible to the human ear. Humans can’t hear frequencies over 20 kilohertz (kHz). Ultrasound is used by some marine mammals, bats, and rodents for communication and to locate food. Some amphibian predators can also emit and hear sounds at this frequency. 

“One of our hypotheses is that the distress call is addressed to some of these, but it could also be the case that the broad frequency band is generalist in the sense that it’s supposed to scare as many predators as possible,” Ubiratã Ferreira Souza, a study co-author and ecologist at the State University of Campinas’s Institute of Biology (IB-UNICAMP) in São Paulo, Brazil, said in a statement. 

[Related: New proto-amphibian species named after Kermit the Frog.]

Another hypothesis is that this amphibian scream is meant to draw another animal to attack the predator threatening the amphibian. The leaf litter frog (Haddadus binotatus) that lives in the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest deploys this sonic tactic against potential predators, including bats, rodents, some snakes, and small primates.

In the study, a team of researchers recorded the amphibian’s distress call on two separate occasions. They used software to analyze the sound and found that it had a 7 kHz to 44 kHz. 

When emitting the distress call, the leaf litter frog makes a series of movements that are similar to defense positions. The frog raises the front of its body, opens up its mouth, and jerks its head backwards. It then will partially close its mouth and send out a sound that ranges from audible to humans (7 kHZ to 20 kHz) to an ultrasound band (20 kHz to 44 kHz) that humans can’t hear. 

“In light of the fact that amphibian diversity in Brazil is the highest in the world, with more than 2,000 species described, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that other frogs also emit sounds at these frequencies,” said study co-author and IB-UNICAMP PhD student Mariana Retuci Pontes said in a statement. 

Pontes may have discovered the use of this sonic strategy by another species accidentally. In January 2023, pontes saw a rock and an animal that was likely a Hensel’s big-headed frog (Ischnocnema henselii) in the Upper Ribeira State Tourism Park in Iporanga, São Paulo. When she tried to take a photo of the frog, she held it by the hind legs and found that the defensive moment and distress call was similar to the leaf litter frog. Pontes also noticed that a landhead pit viper (Bothrops jararaca) was only a few feet away, which she believes confirms that this behavior is a response to predators. While Pontes was able to record a video, she couldn’t analyze the sound to confirm if ultrasound bands were created. 

[Related: These clams use poop to dominate their habitat.]

“Both species live in leaf litter, are similar in size [between 1.8  and 2.3 inches], and have similar predators, so it’s possible that I. henselii also uses this distress call with ultrasound to defend itself against natural enemies,” study co-author and IB-UNICAMP zoologist Luís Felipe Toledo said in a statement. 

Researchers have also obtained recording of ultrasound calls by three Asian amphibian species, but the frequencies are used for communication between species and its not known if they are deployed when a predator is around

The team plans to address the numerous questions that arose from this discovery. These include which predators are sensitive to the frog’s distress call, how these other animals react to it, and if the call is intended to scare them or attract their natural enemies. 

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Caroline Chaboo’s eyes light up when she talks about tortoise beetles. Like gems, they exist in myriad bright colors: shiny blue, red, orange, leaf green and transparent flecked with gold. They’re members of a group of 40,000 species of leaf beetles, the Chrysomelidae, one of the most species-rich branches of the vast beetle order, Coleoptera. “You have your weevils, longhorns, and leaf beetles,” she says. “That’s really the trio that dominates beetle diversity.”

An entomologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Chaboo has long wondered why the kingdom of life is so skewed toward beetles: The tough-bodied creatures make up about a quarter of all animal species. Many biologists have wondered the same thing, for a long time. “Darwin was a beetle collector,” Chaboo notes.

Of the roughly 1 million named insect species on Earth, about 400,000 are beetles. And that’s just the beetles described so far. Scientists typically describe thousands of new species each year. So—why so many beetle species? “We don’t know the precise answer,” says Chaboo. But clues are emerging.

One hypothesis is that there are lots of them because they’ve been around so long. “Beetles are 350 million years old,” says evolutionary biologist and entomologist Duane McKenna of the University of Memphis in Tennessee. That’s a great deal of time in which existing species can speciate, or split into new, distinct genetic lineages. By way of comparison, modern humans have existed for only about 300,000 years.

Yet just because a group of animals is old doesn’t necessarily mean it will have more species. Some very old groups have very few species. Coelacanth fish, for example, have been swimming the ocean for approximately 360 million years, reaching a maximum of around 90 species and then declining to the two species known to be living today. Similarly, the lizard-like reptile the tuatara is the only living member of a once globally diverse ancient order of reptiles that originated about 250 million years ago.

Another possible explanation for why beetles are so rich in species is that, in addition to being old, they have unusual staying power. “They have survived at least two mass extinctions,” says Cristian Beza-Beza, a University of Minnesota postdoctoral fellow. Indeed, a 2015 study using fossil beetles to explore extinctions as far back as the Permian 284 million years ago concluded that lack of extinction may be at least as important as diversification for explaining beetle species abundance. In past eras, at least, beetles have demonstrated a striking ability to shift their ranges in response to climate change, and this may explain their extinction resilience, the authors hypothesize.

Complicating the mystery of beetle diversity is the fact that some branches of the beetle family tree have many more species than others. For example, dung beetles, which spend their lives rolling deftly crafted balls of excrement, are only modestly diverse. “This family is around 8,000 species, so it’s not a huge group,” says community ecologist Jorge Ari Noriega at Universidad El Bosque in Bogotá, Colombia.

By contrast, Chrysomeloidea—a superfamily containing longhorn and leaf beetles—includes 63,000 species, while Brupestoidea, a group of metallic wood- and leaf-boring beetles also known as jewel beetles for their glitzy iridescent colors, includes about 15,000 species.

This large variation in species richness among beetle lineages means that “no one explanation holds very well for any one group,” says McKenna. Still, among plant-eating beetles—which make up roughly a quarter of all beetle species—a clear pattern is emerging. Based on genetic analyses of different beetle lineages, McKenna and his colleagues have found evidence that a major factor spurring beetle diversity was the diversification of flowering plants during the Cretaceous period.

During the Cretaceous period, which started around 145 million years ago, an explosion of new flowering plant species spread across the Earth’s surface, colonizing many different habitats. Today, plants make up about 80 percent of the mass of Earth’s life. Making the most of plants as food is an ecological strategy that has helped fuel the radiation of not only beetles but also herbivorous species including ants, bees, birds and mammals.

In the case of herbivorous beetles, their most species-rich lineages carry a fascinating assortment of genes that permit the digestion of plants, McKenna has found. Many of these genes code for enzymes that help to break down plant cell walls, allowing access to sugars stored in hard-to-digest compounds like cellulose, hemicellulose and pectin. “The lineages that have these genes were the ones that are so incredibly successful,” McKenna says.

These genes were ingenious adaptations that turned indigestible plant parts into food. They allowed herbivorous beetles to eat more and different kinds of plants, which in turn enabled the insects to move into new habitats and occupy new ecological niches. As plant-eating beetles spread out geographically and adopted different diets and lifestyles, the genetic differences between them grew, resulting in new species.

For reasons unclear, some species of plant-eating beetles lost their digestion-aiding genes as they evolved, including a gene coding for pectinase, an enzyme that enables the breakdown of pectin. Evolutionary ecologist Hassan Salem at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen, Germany, explains that to compensate, some beetles evolved a different strategy for eating plants: They forged relationships with bacterial partners—called symbionts—that also aid plant digestion.

For some beetles, these special symbiotic microbes became an alternate tool for keeping plants on the menu, expanding the number of habitats where new species could evolve and thrive. For example, in the vast majority of tortoise leaf beetle species, the group Salem studies, it’s not a genetically encoded enzyme that breaks down pectin, but a bacterial symbiont. The beetles get the bacteria from their mothers: Every time a female deposits an egg, she also leaves behind a capsule containing the microbes. The tortoise beetle embryo develops inside the egg, then burrows into the capsule to digest the symbiont about a day before it emerges.

“It’s the first thing it encounters in life … so it’s a very intimate association,” says Salem. When Salem and his team have experimentally removed the microbe caplets from developing larvae, the adult, germ-free beetles that emerge have a high mortality rate because they can’t access pectin in the plant cell.

In addition to making plants easier to digest, some plant-associated microbes may have paved the way for beetle diversification because they provide beetles with predator protection. In the tortoise leaf beetle Chelymorpha alternans, for example, a fungus called Fusarium—often found in crops like bananas and sweet potatoes—grows on the surface of beetle pupae during metamorphosis. “We’ve demonstrated that if you remove the fungus, then ants readily find them and feed on them,” says Aileen Berasategui, an evolutionary biologist at the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment in the Netherlands. Fusarium, in other words, may be shielding the beetles from harmful predators, further expanding beetle territory and enabling diversification.

Berasategui adds that plenty of bark beetles, like ambrosia beetles, also benefit from Fusarium fungi, but in a different way. The beetles carry the fungi from tree to tree in specialized pockets called mycangia. Once the tree’s fungal infection is underway, the beetles indulge in a fungi feast.

Adapting to conduct this kind of agriculture—sowing spores that will grow into food—has also helped beetle species to exploit new habitats. “From their own nest, they take a little piece, and then … fly to a new tree where they start their own nest, they sow the new fungus, they generate this new garden,” says Berasategui. Called fungiculture, the approach has independently evolved in ambrosia beetles seven times. The evolution of new beetle species is thought to have been shaped by mutually beneficial relationships with these fungi—part of a 50-million-year history in which insects such as ants, termites and ambrosia beetles have independently evolved to farm fungi, according to a 2005 article published in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics.

Plant-eating beetles have evolved other innovations that may have allowed them to speciate more than other beetle groups. In the leaf beetles that Chaboo studies, for example, the emergence in the fossil record of defensive fecal shieldsstructures built from a beetle’s own excretions and sloughed-off skin—“coincide with massive species radiations,” she says. Most beetle shield-users are solitary species, but some live in groups, arranging themselves in formations that protect them from predators. Fecal shield protection may have helped the beetles move into more open habitats, Chaboo says.

Whether they eat plants or dine on other fare such as carrion, beetles from all groups have evolved an impressive array of tools to solve many different problems. In that sense, beetles are a microcosm of the tree of life, McKenna says.

Resilient as beetles are, however, we can’t take their survival for granted. Insect populations are in decline in many places—“and, yes, beetles are part of that,” says Beza-Beza. How they’ll survive the impacts of humans is “one of the core questions right now,” he adds, though he’s betting there will be beetles on Earth “longer than there will be humans.”

Beetling away on scientific puzzles in the Central American cloud forest sky islands where he works, Beza-Beza has a special affinity for Ogyges politus, a beetle species that lives and feeds on rotting logs. “It only occurs in the mountains next to my hometown,” he says. “So it reminds me where I’m from … and that there are these jewels everywhere.”

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

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On April 3, renowned ethnologist Dr. Jane Goodall celebrated her 90th birthday. Goodall’s impactful work studying chimpanzees spans more than 60 years and inspired generations of scientists, conservationists, and photographers. To celebrate Goodall’s birthday and her lasting influence, Vital Impacts and the Jane Goodall Institute have launched a joint campaign highlighting 90 trailblazing female photographers.

“There’s no one else in the world who has done more to shape humanity’s perspective on the planet, its wildlife, and our interconnectedness than Jane Goodall,” photographer and Vital Impacts founder Ami Vitale said. “Her legacy literally spans continents, generations, and cultures, and she has created a global movement of stewardship and compassion. Jane’s legacy isn’t just about studying chimpanzees; it’s about breaking down barriers, fostering empathy, and fostering a deeper connection with nature. Her spirit lives on in every one of us who has been touched by her words.  She inspires us all to make a positive difference in the world.”

As part of the “The Nature of Hope: 90 Years of Jane Goodall’s Impact” campaign, Vital Impacts will host a photography sale featuring the work of female photographers inspired by Goodall. Proceeds for the sale will benefit the Jane Goodall Institute’s global chapter.

“Photographers in the conservation landscape are a window to the world; and women who come together are a force—the combo is a great way to create awareness about the beauty of the planet we live on,” photographer Karine Aigner said. “This project not only supports, empowers and uplifts female creatives, it allows the public to participate in hope, and it gives back to conservation—what better way to celebrate a birthday and a cause?!”

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Sharks and owls are evolutionarily optimized in surprisingly similar ways. When it comes to the ocean’s apex predator, their skin’s textured patterns, known as riblets, help cut down on drag. With owls, their tiny feather ridges called serrations allow them to fly silently while hunting prey.

Although the naturally-occurring aids have inspired biomimicry-based aeronautic designs in the past, a collaborative team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and MIT Lincoln Laboratory recently investigated if these same principles could also apply to underwater tools. Their findings, published in a new study in Extreme Mechanics Letters, indicate the designs could be adapted to improve the towed sonar arrays (TSAs) utilized by ships and submarines.

TSAs are vital for marine vessels engaged in underwater security or exploration projects. But if ships start cruising at decent speeds, the ensuing drag around the equipment can generate extra noise that interferes with sonar capabilities.

[Related: Did sonar finally uncover Amelia Earhart’s missing plane?]

Utilizing computational modeling, researchers tested various riblet shapes and patterns interacting with simulated water environments. From calm currents to the more commonly unpredictable flows seen in oceans, the team observed how smooth, triangular, trapezoidal, and scalloped riblets might affect fluid dynamics and acoustics.

Of these variations, the rectangular form showed the most promising results in choppy water—reducing noise by over 14-percent alongside a roughly 5 percent reduction in drag. When the riblets were finer and closer to one another, drag could be reduced by as much as an additional 25 percent.

These simulations not only showcased potential riblet patterns for sonar casings, but also illuminated new fluid dynamics that underpin noise reduction during turbulent water flows. In a process researchers call “vortex lifting,” flows are elevated and redirected away from the textured surfaces while also lowering their rotational strength.

“This elevation is key to reducing the intense pressure fluctuations that are generated by the interaction between the water flow and the array wall, leading to noise production,” Zixiao Wei, a mechanical engineering graduate student and study first author, said in a recent statement.

The team also noted that adding the animal-inspired textures to TSAs and other underwater vehicles wouldn’t just help humans—it could improve habitat conditions for marine wildlife, as well. Systems reliant on riblet patterns could make for quieter operating, thereby reducing the chances of artificially disturbing their surrounding ecosystems.

That said, it’s one thing to simulate shark skin—actually replicating it has proven extremely difficult. But with additional testing and deployment, Wei believes the new designs will showcase “the vast potential of biomimicry in advancing engineering and technology.”

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This article was originally featured on Undark.

For centuries, taxonomists have cataloged every living thing they could find. Expeditions have traveled the globe, searching for unknown species; museums and universities maintain entire departments devoted to classifying specimens.

But there exists no single, unified list of all the species on Earth.

The lack of consistency in taxonomy has always bothered Stephen Garnett. Every 10 years, the conservation biologist has assessed the extinction risk of Australian birds. But he repeatedly ran into inconsistencies between lists: A single species might have multiple scientific names, or, conversely, a single name could refer to different organisms. The problem, he found, extended far beyond birds. Taxonomists in different fields didn’t define species the same way, and classification systems were largely inefficient and poorly governed.

Eventually, Garnett spoke with an ornithologist friend, Les Christidis, who shared his concerns. “And then we wrote this thing in Nature that got people stirred up,” recalled Garnett.

Their 2017 commentary in the prestigious science journal was inflammatory from the opening salvo: “For a discipline aiming to impose order on the natural world, taxonomy (the classification of complex organisms) is remarkably anarchic.”

Garnett and Christidis proposed tidying things by creating a universal set of rules for classifying all life on Earth and assigning governance to a single organization: the International Union of Biological Sciences, a nonprofit comprising international science associations.

The notion of imposed authority enraged taxonomists, a fastidious bunch who even Garnett concedes are the opposite of anarchists. In the most prominent rebuttal, 184 people from the global taxonomy community warned in the journal PLOS Biology that the proposed bureaucracy was not only unnecessary and counterproductive, but also a threat to scientific freedom. Such governance would result in “science losing its soul,” wrote a smaller group of Brazilian and French scientists in another journal, raising the specter of Joseph Stalin and his political rejection of established science in the early 20th century.

For their part, Garnett and Christidis politely acknowledged the criticism and conceded that the problem of differing species definitions may be insolvable. But at the very least, there “is a need for legitimised global checklists of species that conservation authorities can follow,” they wrote.

The dust could have settled there, into a heap of perpetual disagreement. But Garnett wasn’t satisfied. “When it was over, I thought, ‘Well I actually want to get some change here,’” he said. So, Garnett and Christidis struck up a dialogue with some of the PLOS Biology paper’s authors, including ichthyologist Richard Pyle.

The scientists shared a sense of urgency about the need for a common language to describe biodiversity. The approximately 2 million complex organisms that humans have identified so far represent only a fraction of life on Earth. And the rate of species loss is accelerating at an alarming pace. Up to 1 million species are now threatened with extinction, according to a 2019 United Nations report.

While the taxonomists made clear that different disciplines would never submit to a central authority telling them how to define species, the group could agree on the need to compile one universally accepted list. That way, when people discuss the fate of an endangered salamander, for example, everyone can be sure they are referring to the same creature. “We need to have a common shared understanding of that,” said Pyle, “in order to communicate between what the taxonomists are discovering about the diversity of nature and the conservation biologists are doing to prioritize what limited resources we have to protect it.”

In February 2020, those discussions culminated in a three-day workshop at Charles Darwin University in Australia, where Garnett is a professor. There, an international group of scientists hammered out set of principles to guide the creation of the global species list. The group hopes to get universal buy-in—something previous efforts to create a global inventory have lacked.

Today, their vision appears to be taking shape. Although the devil is in the details, a recent survey found strong support for the idea of a catalog comprising the most accurate, up-to-date species lists from each discipline. If all goes according to plan, the initial version should be available by 2030.

“It was one of those little nice opportunities for science to work the way it’s supposed to work,” said Pyle.

Taxonomy is more than just naming things; it is the art and science of classification. Frank Zachos, who helped develop the principles at the workshop in Australia, describes taxonomy as perhaps the most fundamental biological science because it reflects how humans think about and structure the world. “We will always put things in drawers,” he said. (Zachos was speaking figuratively but also literally; as head of the mammal collection at the Natural History Museum Vienna, in Austria, Zachos noted that he actually files specimens in drawers.)

An integral part of classifying organisms is giving them a scientific name—generally a two-part name, in Latin, using a system that dates back to the 18th century, and that now extends to everything from Canis familiaris (a dog) to the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (a parasitic fungus that hijacks ants’ minds).

At least in theory, anyone can name a new species: For example, to name a new animal species, you need to publish the name, along with a description of the species and some additional details, in a scientific journal or book chapter. You also need to designate the location of a specimen—in a museum, for example—that others can refer to. The rule, according to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature—which sets the standards for scientific nomenclature of animals—is one organism, one name. If a species is mistakenly named twice, the oldest published name is considered valid. Similarly, if two species wind up with the same name, the first one named gets to keep it.

But with approximately 18,000 new species identified every year, the ICZN, which comprises 26 volunteer commissioners and one full-time staff member, can only check that a name conforms to its rules. They don’t weigh in on how to define or identify species. “We keep entirely out of science,” said Thomas Pape, the ICZN’s current president.

While the ICZN occasionally does rule on naming disagreements—a decade ago it famously settled a two-century-old dispute regarding a giant tortoise—they leave it to scientists in individual fields to work out what constitutes a species. The issue is that while nature is usually continuous, our classifications, like our language, are necessarily discrete, said Zachos: “If you draw lines along a continuum, ultimately there is some level of arbitrariness if you are talking about gray areas.”

One of the frustrations that led Garnett to co-author the Nature commentary is that criteria differ by field. Mammal taxonomists, for example, list two populations as different “species if they have a common ancestor but differ physically or genetically,” he wrote. Bird taxonomists, on the other hand, favor the more conservative criterion that differing species can’t produce fertile offspring together. If ornithologists followed mammalian criteria, research suggests that the number of bird species would more than double.

As Garnett has discovered inventorying Australian birds, even within a field, scientists don’t always agree where to draw lines. There are at least four major international lists of birds, for example, each reflecting several points of disagreement on species identification.

And while birds, mammals, reptiles, flowers, and ferns are well cataloged, much of life on Earth lacks a taxonomic champion: someone willing to spend months and years sifting through online databases, scientific journals, and ancient texts to create databases of identified species.

In addition to his work for the ICZN, Pape, a professor at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, has also taken on the task of cataloging the world’s flies. Over the last two decades he and collaborator Neal Evenhuis, an entomologist at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii have devoted much of their free time to the fly database, scouring references dating back to a 1758 text written by Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus and resolving countless cases where names for an insect differed. To date, they have cataloged 250,000 names for species and groups of species, representing nearly 10 percent of all animals on Earth.

With the advent of the internet and the ability to share lists online, people began to envision compiling such efforts into a master list of species. Catalogue of Life, an international collaboration, has been working on one for the last two decades. But it’s a Herculean task, said Donald Hobern, a software engineer who chairs the organization’s taxonomy group. An amateur naturalist, Hobern also volunteers his time cleaning up species lists for moths and butterflies. Those and some other sections of the Catalogue of Life databases, he said, are still “very patchy.”

But the biggest stumbling block for Catalogue of Life—or any organization that tried to assemble a global list—is that until now, scientists haven’t been compelled to resolve disputes within disciplines to create one consensus list for each field, said Hobern. “There’s no single, completely uncontroversial frame of reference that says ‘this is the right view.’” And unless the global scientific community accepts the component lists, the Catalogue of Life is just another inventory, not the authoritative list of life on Earth.

For Garnett, the problem was simple: A decentralized system of species lists has left scientists unable to talk about nature in a way that everyone understands. And that communications gap, Garnett and others suspect, has led to real-world problems.

One issue is that international treaties to conserve and protect species don’t always work from the same lists. For example, white-naped cranes are listed as Grus vipio on one conservation agreement and Antigone vipio on another. Countries also don’t always agree on how to identify a species or its protective status. In his Nature commentary, Garnett pointed out that China’s outdated official wildlife lists have left some two dozen now-endangered species exposed to illegal trade. He and his colleagues hope that the availability of a global list would help the world’s governments in keeping checklists and regulations up to date.

In a paper published after the workshop, several of the attendees highlight how disagreement over names and identifications can pose grave risks to humans as well. Taxonomy is a dynamic process: As scientific knowledge evolves, taxonomists modify species definitions and names. But changes can take years to trickle down through various bureaucracies. Currently, plants and animals that could harbor pests or disease sometimes clear customs because the name on the quarantine list doesn’t match the name on the cage or seeds, said Garnett. It “can have devastating economic effects if diseases get through.”

Garnett and others also expect that the need for one consensus list from each discipline will spur people in those fields to fill gaps and work out discrepancies. The bird folks are already talking with one another to produce a single global list, he told me in a follow-up email.

And those vetted lists will no doubt weed out spurious entries from “taxonomic vandals,” people who name things without the support of scientific peers. In one recent notable case of alleged vandalism, members of the herpetology community accused amateur Australian herpetologist Raymond Hoser of using suspect science in naming (and, in some cases, renaming) scores of snakes, geckos, skinks, and crocodiles after himself, family members, pets, or whatever else strikes him, bestowing names like Dannyleeus rayhammondi, Ctenophorus sharonhoserae, Funkichelys funki, and Hosmeria shuddafakup.

It sounds comical, but the wrong taxonomy can have deadly consequences, said Garnett. He pointed to a paper citing case studies in Africa and Papua New Guinea where confusion over snake taxonomy led to people dying of snake bites after receiving the wrong antivenin.

But perhaps most important to the group that traveled to the workshop in Australia, a global species list represents a shared language for communicating about our world.

I caught up to ichthyologist Richard Pyle while he was on an expedition to record fishes around Wake Island, a tiny coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, about 1,500 miles northeast of Guam. He and his crew were taking a baseline inventory of shallow reef fishes to be able to see how populations change over time.

Pyle likens biodiversity to the world’s greatest library, an information storehouse containing 4 billion years’ worth of wisdom shaped by evolution. In this age of mass extinction, the library is on fire. Losing a species is like the last copy of a book going up in flames, said Pyle. For each identified species that goes extinct, five or 10 more disappear that humans never knew existed, he said. “What secrets are lost when we burn the last copies of those books?”

Conservationists are doing a valiant job as firefighters, but they can’t work efficiently because they are only familiar with 10 to 20 percent of the library, said Pyle. “What taxonomy does is we try to build the card catalog of that library, as quickly as we can, to help guide the efforts of conservation biology.” A continuously updated global species list ensures that everyone has the key to what we know about life on Earth.

Mammal taxonomist Frank Zachos arrived at the Australian workshop extremely jetlagged, after traveling 30 hours from his home in Vienna. But the group’s collaborative attitude and laser focus was a bracing tonic. “People put everything on the table saying: ‘Okay, this, this, and this—where do we agree?’” said Zachos. They quickly found consensus around key points, he said.

One point was clear from the start: Despite Garnett and Christidis’ original vision of universal rules for defining and naming species, bureaucrats would have no authority over taxonomic science. “We are not telling the insect guy how to do insect taxonomy. That’s up to the entomologists,” said Zachos. “What we want is a certain quality management for a final insect or bird list.”

During their 2020 meeting, the group settled on 10 principles that spell out the criteria that individual lists must meet to be included in the master inventory of species. The individual lists must be based on science, rather than optimized for political or even conservation considerations, for example. And the groups creating them must record and report on their methods.

In addition, the group emphasized that lists should be built with local expertise. As it stands, says Zachos, too often people from the Global North are talking about biodiversity in the Global South without including the perspective of people who live there.

In 2021, members of the group published a series of papers that justified the need for a global list and detailed how it would work. The goal is to get people who create and use species lists on board, said Zachos. “All the authority that we will have comes from the quality of the work.”

So far, the idea seems popular. A 2022 survey of more than 1,000 people, mostly taxonomists and other scientists, found widespread enthusiasm, with more than three-quarters of respondents supporting the development of a governance system to create and maintain a single list of life on Earth.

“We did not expect to see as much agreement as we did,” said lead author Aaron Lien, an environmental scientist at the University of Arizona. Because of the early controversy, he said that he was pleasantly surprised that so many taxonomists backed the global list—though respondents were still divided over who, precisely, should oversee the project.

Catalogue of Life seems like an obvious home for the global list. “Not taking Catalogue of Life on board would be, in many regards, also reinventing the wheel and also probably disrespecting all the work that has gone on to into that,” Zachos said. “So, I think it makes a lot of sense to team up with them.” Currently, most of the financial support for the organization has come from short-term grants, particularly from the European Commission and the National Science Foundation in the U.S. But it would likely need additional funding, possibly from international conservation and scientific organizations, to take it on. 

Ichthyologist Lynne Parenti, who’s listed as an author on the PLOS Biology comment criticizing the original proposal by Garnett and Christidis, but who was not involved in crafting the principles, thinks that there is great value in a global list and is also cautiously supportive of putting Catalogue of Life in charge of it. Wherever the list lives, it must be updated regularly, said Parenti. “Our understanding of the world is not static.”

As for how to handle disputes, Garnett envisions a separate organization comprised of taxonomists and users of taxonomy that could act as an arbitrator.

These days, Pape, the entomologist and ICZN president, is feeling optimistic. His database of fly species is nearly complete, so he and his colleague are mostly focused on housekeeping tasks such as fixing misspellings and inserting references as well as adding the 1,000 or so new species identified every year. After we first spoke, I followed up to ask Pape why he has devoted his life to cataloging insects. He is driven, he said, by the words of his taxonomic predecessor Carl Linnaeus: “If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost, too.”

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Nature comes in wild colors, like the electric blue tarantulas and brightly spotted poison dart frogs. Named after bull fighters, matador bugs (Anisoscelis alipes) are known for vibrant flag-like red decorations on their hind legs. These insects are native to Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, and Mexico, and scientists have been stumped as to what their signature red flags on their legs are used for. A study recently published in the journal Behaviors Ecology found that this fancy leg waving is actually part of the matador bug’s elaborate defense strategy.

In animals, some of the most obvious and showy traits are usually expressed by males, like an elk’s large antlers or a peacock’s loud plumage. A 2022 study suggested that matador bugs’ leg movements were not a sexual display. Both male and female matador bugs like to flaunt their removable hind legs and the waving behavior did not change if there were potential mates around or not. It led researchers to question if their leg waving warns predators about a potential chemical defense and bad flavor or divert attacks towards their removable hindlegs to increase their chances of getting out alive.

[Related: Cicadas pee in jet streams like bigger animals.]

To try to answer what is going on with their legs, the team on the new study worked in Gamboa, Panama, a small town near the Panama Canal. They attached red flags that mimicked the matador bug’s accessories to the legs of crickets, and observed how predatory birds called motmots responded to the red flags. Motmots are large birds with iridescent feathers, long tails, keen eyesight, and a strong taste for crickets. The team spent about a month just catching the birds for the experiment.

“We placed the nets in areas of the forest where we saw that the birds moved the most and, when an individual was captured, it was immediately taken to the cages and tested,” study co-author and a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) Jorge Medina said in a statement. “When the birds were finished with the tests, we released them back in the same area where they were captured.”

They found that the strikes from the birds were not primarily aimed at the hind leg flags. This indicated that the flags were not used as a way to deflect predator attacks. However, it supported the idea that some sort of chemical defense was potentially being used by the bugs as self-defense. 

The regular crickets were always attacked, but the ones with flags got fewer hits. Matador bugs themselves were actively avoided by the bird, whether they had flags or not. According to the team, this indicates that the flags are just one component of their defense strategy.

[Related: Bug-munching plant turns insect nurseries into death traps.]

To further test the idea that the birds didn’t like the taste of matador bugs, they offered both crickets and matador bugs to baby birds that had never seen them before. With or without their flags, the matador bugs seemed to warn the predators to stay away. When the chicks attacked, they demonstrated that the bugs were distasteful by shaking their heads and often refusing to eat more matador bugs. However, the crickets were readily attacked and eaten. 

“I was fascinated to see that when we outfitted tasty crickets with the matador bug flags they immediately became less appealing to their bird predators,” study co-author and STRI post-doctoral fellow Juliette Rubin said in a statement. “It seems like this warning signal is enough to make the birds cautious, but bugs themselves are so well equipped with ‘don’t eat me!’ signals that even without the flags, experienced birds wouldn’t touch them.”

The team believes that the flags appear to signal to birds that matador bugs are not a tasty or safe choice of a snack. These flags also collaborate with other parts of the bug’s characteristics to emphasize that message. This indicates that they are part of a complex defense strategy that likely evolved to protect them from birds. 

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The living mammal family tree is full of diverse species–big blue whales, great apes, bats, rodents, and humans, to name just a few. The early evolution of mammals is a little bit murky, with some placental mammals even likely living alongside dinosaurs and others arising much later. 

Now, some teeth and ear bones uncovered in present day Inner Mongolia are offering some fresh insight into early mammalian evolution. The findings are described in two studies published April 3 in Nature that feature the work of scientists from the United States, Inner Mongolia, China, and Australia.

Keeping up with the shuotheriids–and their teeth

In the first study, scientists focused on the shuotheriids. This family of mouse-sized mammals from the Jurassic period had molars that are different from those in any living mammal. Their molars had a pseudotalonid– or a basin-like structure in their lower molars more similar to reptiles. By comparison, living mammals have a tribosphenic pattern that interlocks with upper molars when chewing food.  

“This unique tooth pattern has hindered our comprehension of shuotheriid relationships and the first steps in the evolution of mammaliaform species,” study co-author and Monash University paleontologist Patricia Vickers-Rich said in a statement.

With these unique back teeth, where these animals fit in the timeline of mammal evolution has been puzzling. Shuotheriids have previously been linked to a group called australosphenidans. This group includes living mammals that lay eggs like the platypus called monotremes. However, this relationship has been a bit controversial among scientists and leaves more questions that aren’t explained by some features seen in later mammals like different molars.

The team analyzed two newly uncovered and well-preserved skeletal fossils of shuotheriids. They lived in the Middle Jurassic between 168–164 million years ago in what is now Inner Mongolia. The team found that the molars of these animals were more similar to another extinct mammal group called the docodontans and not the australosphenidans. The two specimens also belong to a new genus and species named Feredocodon chowi.

[Related: A boiling hot supercontinent could kill all mammals in 250 million years.]

“When you look at the fossil record, both for mammals and many other sorts of animals, teeth are the part of the body that you are most likely to recover,” study co-author and curator in the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Paleontology Jin Meng said in a statement. “Yet since the 1980s, the perplexing tooth shape seen in shuotheriids has been a barrier to our efforts to understand early mammal evolution. These new specimens have allowed us to solve this longstanding problem.”

The team believes that some common mammal ancestor independently gave rise to major groups of mammaliaforms: Docodontiformes, Allotheria, and Holotheria.

Listen up!

The second study focuses on the fossilized skulls of Feredocodon chowi and second new species named Dianoconodon youngi. It lived in the Early Jurassic between 201–184 million years ago. It was similar to an extinct rat-like animal called Morganucodon that is widely regarded as one of the first mammals. 

The team looked at the structure of Dianoconodon youngi’s middle ear, which helps give modern mammals their sharp hearing. In the middle ear, the spot inside the eardrum that turns vibrations in the air into ripples in the inner ear’s fluids has three bones. These bones called auditory ossicles are a feature that is unique to mammals and birds and reptiles only have one middle ear bone. At some point during the early evolution of mammals, the bones that formed the joints of the jaw separated and became associated with hearing. 

[Related: A new evolutionary theory could explain the mystery of shrinking animals.]

Both Feredocodon chowi and Dianoconodon youngi specimens show some fossil evidence of this evolutionary transition in action, as mammals evolved from a group that includes lizards, crocodilians, and dinosaurs. The team believes that this transition began from an ancestral animal that had a double jaw joint. It likely had the joint of a mammal on the outside and a more reptilian joint on the inside.

Analyses on the older fossil (Dianoconodon youngi) show that one of its two joints, the reptilian one, was already beginning to lose its ability to handle the forces created by chewing. The younger fossil (Feredocodon chowi) had a more mammalian middle ear that was formed and adapted exclusively for hearing.

“Scientists have been trying to understand how the mammalian middle ear evolved since Darwin’s time,” said Meng. “While paleontological discoveries have helped reveal the process during the last a few decades, these new fossils bring to light a critical missing link and enrich our understanding of the gradual evolution of the mammalian middle ear.”

The post New fossils of tiny, toothy early mammals could be a major missing link appeared first on Popular Science.

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Rare earth elements touch almost every aspect of modern life. Elements and minerals including copper, lithium, nickel, and cobalt support the technology that can power clean energy, electric vehicles,  telescope lenses, and computer screens, and more. Since they are stored deep within the Earth, extracting these elements can be ecologically damaging.

The demand for rare earth elements in countries in Africa is driving the destruction of tropical rainforests, as it is home to over half of the world’s cobalt and copper. Now, the continent’s great ape population is more threatened from mining than scientists originally believed. A study published April 3 in the journal Science Advances estimates that nearly 180,000 gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees are at risk.

[Related: A deep sea mining zone in the remote Pacific is also a goldmine of unique species.]

“There has been an increase in mining in Africa to satisfy the demand from more industrialized countries and linked to the ‘green revolution’. This requires [a] significant amount of critical minerals to build electric cars, wind turbines, etc.,” Genevieve Campbell, a study co-author and primatologist with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and conservation nonprofit re:wild, tells PopSci. “Unfortunately the location of these minerals often overlap with ape habitat, but people are not aware of the impact of their consumption patterns on apes. This study aimed to quantify this impact and bring awareness to this issue.”

Looking at west Africa

In the study, an international team of scientists used data on operational and preoperational mining sites in 17 African countries and defined 6.2 mile wide buffer zones to account for direct impacts from mining, including habitat destruction and light and noise pollution. They also defined 31 mile buffer zones for the more indirect impacts linked to increased human activity near mining sites, including new roads and infrastructure to access formerly remote areas and more human presence. More human activity generally puts more pressure on the animals and their environments due to increased hunting, habitat loss, and a higher risk of disease transmission. 

“Mining often exacerbates existing threats by, for example, building roads to remote areas that in turn facilitate access for hunters,” says Campbell.

Integrating the data on the population density of great apes allowed the team to pinpoint how many African great apes could be negatively impacted by mining activities and mapped out areas where high ape densities and heavy mining overlapped. 

They found that more than one-third of the great ape population–180,000 animals–is in danger. The west African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali, and Guinea had the largest overlaps of high ape density and mining areas. The most significant overlap of mining and chimpanzee density was found in Guinea, where more than than 23,000 chimpanzees (80 percent of the country’s ape population) could be directly or indirectly impacted by mining activities. The most sensitive areas are also not generally protected.

“I expected the spatial overlap between mining projects and ape habitat to be large and I suspected that previous estimates had underestimated the potential impact of mining-related activities on great apes,” study co-author and IUCN and re:wild conservation biologist Jessi Junker tells PopSci. “The results of this study thus didn’t really come as a surprise since no assessments at this spatial scale had been done previously.”

‘Critical Habitat’ zones

The study also explored how mining areas intersect with areas that could be considered ‘Critical Habitat.’  These regions have unique biodiversity and plant life that is crucial to a species’ survival. They found 20 percent overlap between proposed mining areas and Critical Habitat zones. When a region is designated this way strict environmental regulations can be implemented. These regulations particularly apply to any mining projects looking for funding from groups such as the International Finance Corporation (IFC) or other money lenders adhering to similar standards. 

According to the team, previous efforts to map Critical Habitats in African countries have overlooked large portions of ape habitats that would qualify under international benchmarks.

“Companies operating in these areas should have adequate mitigation and compensation schemes in place to minimize their impact, which seems unlikely, given that most companies lack robust species baseline data that are required to inform these actions,” Tenekwetche Sop, a study co-author and manager of the great ape population database at the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History in Germany, said in a statement. “Encouraging these companies to share their invaluable ape survey data with our database serves as a pivotal step towards transparency in their operations. Only through such collaborative efforts can we comprehensively gauge the true extent of mining activities’ effects on great apes and their habitats.”

What can be done

In future research, the team hopes to quantify the direct and indirect impacts of mining activities in a different range of African countries and different ape species. Currently, these risks are not considered often and mitigated by mining companies. The study’s authors also urge mining companies to avoid their impacts on great apes and for more data collection to create a more accurate picture of where apes live in relation to where mining activities may take place. 

[Related: How can we decarbonize copper and nickel mining?]

The general population also has a responsibility to ensure a shift away from fossil fuels does not come at the expense of biodiversity. 

“We can all do something to help protect great apes and their habitat. It is crucial for everyone to adopt a mindset of reduced consumption,” says Junker. “Moreover, policymakers must enact more effective recycling policies to facilitate sustainable reuse of metals.”

The post Mining of materials needed for ‘green revolution’ puts great ape population at risk appeared first on Popular Science.

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At archaeological sites around the world, a certain subset of remains is usually overlooked: rodent bones. Rats have lived (and died) alongside people for thousands of years, leaving small skeletons behind throughout history. Few researchers have examined these diminutive bits of the past, in favor of more charismatic finds. But a new study digs into details of rat bones unearthed at settlement sites and collected from shipwrecks across eastern North America. It uncovers evidence that one hyper-invasive rat species arrived decades earlier than previously thought and rapidly dominated over another to colonize U.S. and Canadian cities.

In the new paper, published April 3 in the journal Science Advances, a team of biomolecular archaeologists, zooarchaeologists, and other scientists analyzed remains from more than 300 rodents previously found at 32 locations along the U.S.’s Eastern and Gulf coasts and the Maritime and St. Laurence regions of Canada. The sites, spanning in age from 1559 to the early 1900s, include early ports and settlements as well as seven shipwrecks explored through damming, dredging, and diving. 

“So little work has been done with archaeological rats,” says lead study author Eric Guiry, a biomolecular archaeologist at Trent University. As a result of this vacuum of information, Guiry says he and his colleagues were able to make several surprising finds about the types of rats present throughout time. The research could better inform our scientific understanding of one of history’s greatest pests.

“It’s a really interesting combination of data,” says Jonathan Richardson, an integrative biologist uninvolved in the new research who studies urban rats at the University of Richmond. Black and brown rats behave differently, carry different zoonotic diseases, and have different impacts on people, he adds, so knowing how and when each species emerged in North America is relevant for understanding urban ecology and human development. “It’s interesting biologically and also historically,” Richardson says.  

Rat fight

The term “rat” encompasses 56 known species, but two are more widespread than any other: the black rat (Rattus rattus) and the brown rat or Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus)—both originally native to different regions of Asia and both now invasive worldwide. Through historical records, it’s long been known that black rats were the first to arrive in North America, stowing away on the ships of Columbus and other European colonists to the Caribbean in the 15th Century, and spreading from there. Brown rats showed up in the Americas later, though exactly how much later has gone unresolved. 

Many historical accounts indicate an arrival date sometime around U.S. independence in 1776, says Guiry. Yet the new research suggests brown rats were in North America much sooner than that. It can be difficult to accurately date brown rat remains at archaeological sites because the rodents burrow (in contrast, black rats climb), and so more recently living brown rats can end up infiltrating older sites. Plus, radiocarbon dating isn’t particularly precise for things less than 300 years old. But the shipwreck data provides clear proof that brown rats were being carried across the Atlantic by 1760 at the latest. Numerous findings from the terrestrial sites further suggest the species established in North America as early as 1731.

Once here, brown rats rapidly took over black rats’ turf, dominating in just a few decades, per the study. 

To distinguish between the historical remains of black and brown rats, the researchers used a molecular analysis protocol called ZooMS that identifies different species based on the amino acid makeup of collagen proteins inside bone. They found that, by the mid-1700s, black rats went from the sole or dominant species in site samples to rare compared to their brown counterparts. Only five black rat specimens were identified from samples after 1760, and just two samples out of 108 showed black rats occuring after 1800. Meanwhile, brown rat samples proliferated over the same time period. The findings provide firm scientific support for anecdotal evidence brown rats had become dominant, outcompeting black rats in most early North American coastal cities by the 1800s. Today, brown rats account for the vast majority of rats in North American cities, with few exceptions

Dietary differences

Brown rats are generally larger and more aggressive than black rats. In many parts of the world, they displace black rats. Though this doesn’t hold true everywhere, and local ecology plays a role. In New Zealand, for instance, black rats reign supreme, says Richardson. What accounts for the different outcomes in different locations is an “ecological mystery”, he adds. 

In North America, Guiry and his colleagues hypothesized that differences in diet and competition for food could be part of why brown rats so quickly won the territory battle. Using carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis, they sketched a rough picture of what rats across their study sites were eating, and found variation by location and species. 

Farther north, the rat bones had lower delta-C-13 ratios, an isotope signature associated with consuming corn and other plants evolved to resist drought. In mid-Atlantic and farther south, rat remains contained relatively higher amounts of ¹³C on average, indicating a diet heavier in corn or warm-weather plants and following human agricultural trends.

Between the species, brown rat bones had a higher delta-N-15 ratio than black rats across sites, suggesting the brown rats were eating more animal protein than their smaller competitors. This difference in protein preference could be part of the reason why black rats failed to hold their ground. 

“It’s possible that where there was overlap between the two [species], it involved the animal protein in the black rats’ diet,” says Guiry. Black rats seemed to eat less meat, eggs, and dairy overall, and when faced with fighting aggressive brown rats for those resources, they likely ate even less, he explains. “That portion of their diet could have been particularly important for reproductive success,” he adds. Maybe, where they had to fight for their protein, black rats were simply able to produce fewer offspring. 

Likely, the brown rats’ victory was the result of a combination of factors. Competition over nest space, human changes to the landscape, and even inter-species predation may have also played a role, suggests Guiry. More research and more sample analysis is needed to know for sure, he says. But thankfully for science, the archaeological record is full of still un-studied rat remains. Guiry and his colleagues are continuing to untangle what this cache of rodent bones can tell us.

Rats past and present

“Archaeology represents a big trove of potential information for ecology, and information that has potential relevance to people today,” says Guiry. “It’s more than just understanding what people did in the past, it [informs the present].”

Richardson agrees. He studies the gene flow of the rats that live alongside humans in cities currently, to track how the pests move between places. The new archaeological work provides clearer context for parsing some of the patterns he’s observed in his work. “We really need that [historical] baseline to be able to understand what’s happening today,” he says. 

The story of rats is also the story of human civilization. From food security to disease risks, rodents play a big role in history and the modern day. “We’re never going to completely exterminate rats. They’re always going to be in and outside of cities,” says Richardson, “so we better do everything we can to understand them.”

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Transitioning towards sustainable clothing practices is a must for combating climate change, so researchers are turning to bacteria for their fashion inspiration. As detailed in the research journal Nature Biotechnology, a team at Imperial College London has genetically engineered new microbial strains capable of being woven into wearable material, while simultaneously self-dyeing itself in the process. The result is a new vegan, plastic-free leather that’s suitable for items such as wallets and shoes—although perhaps not the most fashionable looking shoes at the moment. 

As much as 200 million liters of water is consumed across the global textile industry every year, and 85 percent of all used clothing in the US winds up in landfills. Meanwhile, the particulates shed from washing polyester and other polymer-based fabrics already make up 20-and-35 percent of the oceans’ microplastics. Then there’s all the pesticides used in industrial cotton farming. And when it comes to animal leather production, the statistics are arguably just as bad. Basically, from an ecological standpoint, it costs a lot to dress fashionably.

Sustainable, microbial-based textile alternatives haven increasingly shown promise for greener manufacturing, especially the utilization of bacterial cellulose.

[Related: A new color-changing, shape-shifting fabric responds to heat and electricity.]

“Bacterial cellulose is inherently vegan, and its growth requires a tiny fraction of the carbon emissions, water, land use and time of farming cows for leather,” Tom Ellis, a bioengineering professor at Imperial College London and study lead author, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Unlike plastic-based leather alternatives, bacterial cellulose can also be made without petrochemicals, and will biodegrade safely and non-toxically in the environment.”

Unfortunately, synthetically dyeing products like vegan leather remains some of the most toxic stages within the fashion industry. By combining both the manufacturing and dyeing processes, researchers believe they can create even more environmentally friendly wearables.

To harness both capabilities, Ellis and his colleagues genetically modified bacteria commonly used in microbial cellulose to self-produce a black pigment known as eumelanin. Over a two-week period, the team then allowed their new material to grow over a “bespoke, shoe-shaped vessel.” Once completed, the leather-like cellulose was loaded into a machine that gently shook it for about 48-hours at roughly 86-degrees Fahrenheit, which stimulated the bacteria to begin darkening from the inside out. Finally, the material was attached to a pre-made sole to reveal… well, if not a “shoe,” then certainly a “shoe-shaped vessel.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course. But if the bulbous clogs aren’t your style, maybe the team’s other example—a simple bifold wallet—makes more sense for your daily outfit.

According to their study, the team notes they still want to cut down the cellulose’s water consumption even further, as well as engineering their bacterial cellulose to allow for additional colors, materials, and even patterns.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

John Ford still recalls the first time he heard them. He’d been puttering around the Deserters Group archipelago, a smattering of spruce- and cedar-choked islands in Queen Charlotte Strait, between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia. He was piloting a small skiff and trailing a squad of six killer whales. Ford, then a graduate student, had been enamored with cetacean sounds since listening to belugas chirp while he worked part-time at the Vancouver Aquarium as a teenager. Now here he was, on August 12, 1980, tracking the underwater conversations of wild killer whales through a borrowed hydrophone.

Ford had spent the previous two summers painstakingly recording the sounds made by other groups of these iconic black-and-white marine mammals, known as resident killer whales. In summer and fall, the residents traveled in noisy, tight-knit pods that often hugged the shorelines of British Columbia and Washington State, breaching in spectacular aerial displays that delighted tourists, scientists, and other bystanders. They emitted rapid overlapping clicks and thumps, along with squeals, honks, and bleats that could resemble seal barks or, occasionally, human flatulence.

Yet to Ford, the vocalizations he captured on his reel-to-reel that August day sounded nothing like the resident killer whales he’d recorded in previous years. They were coming from a gang of whales researchers had taken to calling “the oddballs,” because they appeared to scientists to be social outcasts who had left or been driven out of the resident group. Their calls were tonal, more alien, and far louder, sometimes sounding like a rusty hinge on a closing gate. Clicks were infrequent when they came at all. “I was amazed,” Ford says now.

While Ford spent the rest of his career studying whales, eventually leading the cetacean research program for Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Pacific Biological Station before retiring in 2017, he never forgot his reaction that day: these must be different creatures.

More than 40 years later, science is poised to agree.

A new study published last week in the journal Royal Society Open Science by a team of top whale experts argues that across the North Pacific, resident killer whales and the oddballs—long since renamed transient, or Bigg’s, killer whales—aren’t just different ecotypes. They’re entirely distinct species. The researchers contend that both are separate from a third species that encompasses the rest of the world’s killer whales.

Ford, who was not involved in the study, calls the research thorough and definitive, drawing from data collected across disciplines and over decades. “There’re just pieces of the story that have fit together to build, I think, a compelling case,” he says.

By proposing to split Orcinus orca into three separate species—residents, transients, and everything else—scientists aren’t only changing the taxonomic record to more accurately reflect what it means to be a killer whale. They’re also acknowledging the ways that communication, behavior, and even culture can help shape speciation as surely as genetics and physiology do.

Killer whales traverse all the world’s oceans, from polar waters to the tropics. They are the seas’ apex predators, described in scientific literature in 1869 as “wolves of the ocean,” who swim “in small companies” while “living by violence and plunder.” That’s true. Some killer whales eat birds or baby whales or balls of herring. Others prey on manta rays or sea turtles. In Antarctica, they work together to wash seals off ice by swamping floes with waves. In both hemispheres, killer whales have been seen surging onto beaches to pluck seals right off land.

There have long been signs that such hunting behaviors and dietary differences might be more than mere preference. In 1970, whale rustlers herded several killer whales into Pedder Bay, southwest of Victoria, British Columbia, with the intent of capturing them for marine theme parks. For more than 11 weeks, two of the whales refused to eat the fish that handlers served them, becoming more and more emaciated. What no one knew then was that these captives were transients, not the resident killer whales who were known to specialize in chinook salmon as prey. Scientists didn’t yet understand that transients even existed, or that they’d eat seals, porpoises, dolphins, even humpback calves—but not fish.

“These prey specializations aren’t just choices that orcas make on a daily basis—they are hardwired,” says Bob Pitman, a marine ecologist and affiliate of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute. In fact, both populations are so set in their ways that researchers have spied resident fish-eating whales slaughtering harbor porpoises for sport without consuming them.

For decades, scientists misunderstood these behaviors, which are consistent everywhere residents and transients are found, from California, British Columbia, and Alaska to Japan, Russia, and beyond. “We didn’t recognize that as being evolutionarily significant,” says Phillip Morin, a marine mammal geneticist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Southwest Fisheries Science Center who led the Royal Society Open Science study.

By 2003, the population of one subsection of residents—the southern residents, often spied in and around the Salish Sea, which stretches from BC’s Strait of Georgia to Washington’s Budd Inlet—had plummeted to 83 individuals from an estimated high in the 19th century of more than 200. Scientists in the United States trying to advise the government on how to offer federal protections to these particular whales struggled to describe how they fit in with the rest of the world’s killer whales, and vice versa. Nor did scientists know how long members of a group struggling to survive had gone without breeding with other killer whale groups in the same area.

So Morin spent years coordinating with fellow experts, amassing evidence about the peculiarities of residents and transients across the North Pacific. Some elements had been known for decades. For instance, transients don’t just eat differently than residents, they hunt differently, too. Unlike their chatterbox neighbors, transients use stealth, and stalk meals in silence (likely because their prey use sound too). And while residents live in stable pods for decades, transients travel in looser groups with shifting alliances.

Furthermore, killer whales often live in communities with their own rituals, which get passed down from one generation to the next through social learning. Even subgroups of resident whales that are nearly genetically identical and overlap geographically can behave quite differently, their dialects as unalike as Spanish and Japanese. Northern residents, for example, frequently zip into shallow waters to scratch their bellies on the gravelly seafloor. Southern residents, who frequent similar waters, have never been documented doing that. Instead, they hold multi-pod gatherings and occasionally push baby salmon with their snouts—neither of which is a popular pastime with northern residents.

Alone, none of these differences is enough to classify different communities or ecotypes as distinct species. But for some groups of killer whales, what started out as behavioral traits handed down through generations may have ultimately helped lead to something more. “Most people tend to think [something is] either a different species or it’s not,” Pitman says. But “you have to understand: evolution is a slow change over time. It’s not a black-and-white situation.”

Over several decades, Morin’s compilation of research helped illuminate differences both subtle and extraordinary, through methods as diverse as finding and studying whale skulls and using cameras attached to drones. Transients, compared to residents, are longer and fatter, with more triangular dorsal fins. Their jaws are more robust and curved—a necessity, perhaps, for wrangling a half-tonne dinner of Steller sea lion.

But some of the most compelling distinctions come from work by Morin and colleague Kim Parsons, a research geneticist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center. When studying tissue samples, Parsons found that whenever whales look, act, feed, and sound like transients, they have DNA that’s noticeably distinct from residents. In fact, Morin’s work showed that the two whale types, even when swimming in nearby waters, are so genetically removed from one another that they haven’t interbred for at least several hundred thousand years. As Parsons puts it: “They’ve obviously been on very separate, very divergent, and independent paths of evolution for a very, very long time.”

This pattern remains true across the North Pacific. Andrew Foote, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oslo who has studied killer whales but wasn’t part of this study, says that this speaks to how robust the barriers to gene flow are between residents and transients.

Morin’s best guess is that as ice ages came and went, groups of whales became isolated by changing geography and were forced to specialize. “There was this physical separation, which is the normal way that speciation starts to occur, and the cultural variation was overlaid on top of that,” Morin says. When the environment shifted again and whales came back together, “cultural differences reinforced the separation.”

Other animals that separated for millennia then reunited might not have a problem reintegrating, Morin adds. But killer whales have such cohesive family bonds and distinct dialects that “this cultural aspect helps drive their divergence—or at least helps maintain it.”

For the moment, killer whales globally will remain a single species. The Society for Marine Mammalogy’s taxonomy committee will debate the findings of Morin and his colleagues, maybe later this spring, and many experts suspect they will eventually accept the proposed partitioning of killer whales into three species: transients (Orcinus rectipinnus), residents (Orcinus ater), and everything else, including the offshore whales that also call the North Pacific home. All of those would still go by Orcinus orca—at least for now. This research may eventually pave the way for further divisions among the rest of the planet’s killer whales.

In the meantime, Ford looks forward to being able to finally settle a longstanding argument. “What this paper is going to do is resolve a problem I’ve had for years,” he says, chuckling. When he talks to the public highlighting differences between these whales, or tells someone at a dinner party how he spent his career, he invariably faces a question: “Why aren’t they different species?”

Now he can say, “I think they will be soon.”

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

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Arachnids are born dancers. After millions of years of evolution, many species rely on fancy footwork to communicate everything from courtship rituals, to territorial disputes, to hunting strategies. Researchers usually observe these movements in lab settings using what are known as laser vibrometers. After aiming the tool’s light beam at a target, the vibrometer measures miniscule vibration frequencies and amplitudes emitted from the Doppler shift effect. Unfortunately, such systems’ cost and sensitivity often limit their field deployment.

To find a solution for this long-standing problem, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln PhD student recently combined an array of tiny, cheap contact microphones alongside a sound-processing machine learning program. Then, once packed up, he headed into the forests of north Mississippi to test out his new system.

Noori Choi’s results, recently published in Communications Biology, highlight a never-before-seen approach to collecting spiders’ extremely hard-to-detect movements across woodland substrates. Choi spent two sweltering summer months placing 25 microphones and pitfall traps across 1,000-square-foot sections of forest floor, then waited for the local wildlife to make its vibratory moves. In the end, Choi left the Magnolia State with 39,000 hours of data including over 17,000 series of vibrations.

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

Not all those murmurings were the wolf spiders Choi wanted, of course. Forests are loud places filled with active insects, chatty birds, rustling tree branches, as well as the invasive sounds of human life like overhead plane engines. These sound waves are also absorbed into the ground as vibrations, and need to be sifted out from scientists’ arachnid targets.

“The vibroscape is a busier signaling space than we expected, because it includes both airborne and substrate-borne vibrations,” Choi said in a recent university profile.

In the past, this analysis process was a frustratingly tedious, manual endeavor that could severely limit research and dataset scopes. But instead of pouring over roughly 1,625 days’ worth of recordings, Choi designed a machine learning program capable of filtering out unwanted sounds while isolating the vibrations from three separate wolf spider species: Schizocosa stridulans, S. uetzi, and S. duplex.

Further analysis yielded fascinating new insights into arachnid behaviors, particularly an overlap of acoustic frequency, time, and signaling space between the S. stridulans and S. uetzi sibling species. Choi determined that both wolf spider variants usually restricted their signaling for when they were atop leaf litter, not pine debris. According to Choi, this implies that real estate is at a premium for the spiders.

“[They] may have limited options to choose from, because if they choose to signal in different places, on different substrates, they may just disrupt the whole communication and not achieve their goal, like attracting mates,” Choi, now a postdoctoral researcher at Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, said on Monday.

What’s more, S. stridulans and S. uetzi appear to adapt their communication methods depending on how crowded they are at any given time, and who was crowding them. S. stridulans, for example, tended to lengthen their vibration-intense courtship dances when they detected nearby, same-species males. When they sensed nearby S. uetzi, however, they often varied their movements slightly to differentiate them from the other species, thus reducing potential courtship confusion.

In addition to opening up entirely new methods of observing arachnid behavior, Choi’s combination of contact microphones and machine learning analysis could also help others one day monitor an ecosystem’s overall health by keeping an ear on spider populations.

“Even though everyone agrees that arthropods are very important for ecosystem functioning… if they collapse, the whole community can collapse,” Choi said. “Nobody knows how to monitor changes in arthropods.”

Now, however, Choi’s new methodology could allow a non-invasive, accurate, and highly effective aid in staying atop spiders’ daily movements.

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The mystery of what came first, the chicken or the egg has generally been solved–it was the egg. However, some questions remain about how well chickens were dispersed in the ancient world, as some wild bird bones have been misidentified as domesticated chicken bones. 

With the help of new technology, a recent analysis of eggshell fragments from Central Asia suggests that raising chickens for egg production was likely common in the region from about 400 BCE to 1000 CE. The domestic chicken’s ability to lay eggs outside of a traditional breeding season was potentially the primary driver for the dispersal of these birds across Eurasia and northeast Africa. The findings are described in a study published April 2 in the journal Nature Communications and helps explain how they became such a critical economic and agricultural resource.

An international team of archaeologists, historians, and biomolecular scientists studied eggshell fragments from 12 different archaeological sites in Central Asia spanning about 1,500 years. They were likely dispersed along the central corridor of the ancient Silk Road, a vast Eurasian trade network spanning from present day China to the Mediterranean Sea. The network was used from the second century BCE through the mid-15th century and facilitated religious, cultural, economic, and political interactions between Asian and European countries. 

[Related: Humans have been eating hazelnuts for at least 6,000 years.]

To identify the source of the egg fragments, they used a biomolecular analysis method called ZooMS. It can identify a particular species from animal remains, including bone, skin, and shells. ZooMS also relies on protein signals instead of DNA, which makes it a quicker and more cost-effective option than genetic analysis, according to the team.  

“This study showcases the potential of ZooMS to shed light on human-animal interactions in the past,” Carli Peters, a study co-author and archaeologist at Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, said in a statement.

The technique identified the shell fragments as pieces of domestic chicken egg, which is a key finding. The team believes that the amount of chicken egg shells present throughout the layers of sediment at each archeological site means that the birds must have been laying eggs more frequently than their wild ancestor–the red jungle fowl. These colorful tropical birds are still found throughout Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia, and only nest once per year, laying about six eggs per clutch. Domestic chickens lay eggs much more frequently, with some hens able to lay one egg per day, so ancient peoples must have taken advantage of this egg laying ability that was not beholden to a specific season. 

The abundance of the eggshells suggests that the birds were laying eggs out of season. Having this access to eggs that were not dependent on a particular season likely made the domestic chicken a particularly useful animal.

[Related: Finally, a smart home for chickens.]

“This is the earliest evidence for the loss of seasonal egg laying yet identified in the archaeological record,” study co-author and Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology paleoecologist and paleoeconomist Robert Spengler said in a statement. “This is an important clue for better understanding the mutualistic relationships between humans and animals that resulted in domestication.”

The study suggests that at least in Central Asia, the domestic chicken’s ability to lay several eggs made it the important agricultural species that it is today. The team hopes that work like this demonstrates how using new cost-effective analysis methods like ZooMS and interdisciplinary collaboration can be used to address long-standing questions about our past. 

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When a winter storm lies on the horizon, the salt trucks spring into action. By spreading salt—regular old sodium chloride, the same kind we put on our food—over every inch of our roads, we’ve figured out how to make them safe for drivers even as slick snow and ice coat the asphalt, turning hazards into mere inconveniences.

But that salt doesn’t just disappear after a storm. Slowly, the salt trickles down off the road and into the water system while filling up rivers, lakes and wetlands—and massively boosting the salinity of these freshwater bodies. And for freshwater wildlife, living in a salty pond can lead to things like stunted growth, increased susceptibility to disease and even death, says Rick Relyea, a biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 

But Relyea and his colleagues have now found evidence that at least one freshwater species, the wood frog, might be able to adapt to saltier water within just a few generations. Exactly how this adaptation happens still isn’t clear, but this finding is a small bit of tentatively good news for efforts to protect wildlife from the dangers of road salt.

“It’s a great example of how evolution through selection can happen really quickly,” Relyea tells PopSci. “And on the upside, buy us some time until we fix some of these problems.”

Road salt can have a profound impact on the chemistry of some freshwater bodies of water. While a pristine lake would probably have less than five milligrams of chloride per liter of water, Relyea says, he’ll find some wetlands with hundreds of milligrams per liter. (For reference, that’s still not anywhere near salt levels in the ocean, where water has about 35 grams of chloride per liter, but still a big change for freshwater wildlife.)

Some freshwater bodies can end up saltier than others, depending on how shallow they are and how much inflow and outflow they have. In April 2022, Relyea and his colleagues collected wood frog eggs from nine different ponds in upstate New York. Each of the ponds was near a road but varied in salt content—ranging from one milligram of chloride per liter to a whopping 744 mg/liter. After collecting the eggs, the team raised each clutch into tadpoles at the lab in freshwater.

Once the tadpoles were swimming around, the researchers undertook what’s called a “time-to-death” experiment, which is exactly what it sounds like—they placed 15 tadpoles from each pond into a cup of water with a lethal dose of salt and tested to see how long they lived. They published their results on March 12 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

Tadpoles from the eight ponds with the lowest salt concentration all died at about the same rate, with none still living after about two days. But tadpoles from the pond with the highest salt concentration survived much longer. By hour 30, when about half of the other tadpoles had died, around 90% of the saltiest-pond tadpoles were still swimming. By hour 50, when all of the other tadpoles were dead, more than 60% of the saltiest-pond tadpoles were still alive. Even on day three, long after the other tadpoles had passed on to the froggy afterlife, a few of the saltiest-pond tadpoles were still kickin’ it.

That saltiest pond is probably especially salty because it’s been surrounded by a large parking lot for around 25 years, Relyea says. And the remarkable survival of its frogs may not be coincidental. Relyea notes that wood frogs return to the same ponds and wetlands each year to lay eggs—meaning the eggs they collected may stem from a micro-population of frogs that has bred in that same parking lot-adjacent pond for more than two decades, or roughly 10 generations. With little genetic mixing between populations, this process could have driven the frogs to adapt to saltier conditions.

Theoretically, that would apply to the frogs from all the other ponds, too–and the second-saltiest pond in their study was still very salty, with more than 400 mg of chloride per liter. So was the third-saltiest pond, with around 300 mg/liter. Yet despite these still-very-high salt levels, tadpoles from the frog populations at these ponds performed no better than tadpoles from ponds with almost no salt in the time-to-death experiment.

The study authors said this might indicate that there is some threshold beyond which the frogs may start to adapt to high salt conditions, though Relyea also notes there might be some other factor at play here instead. “We don’t know how they did it,” he says, “we just know that they did it.”

For one, it’s also possible that the frog populations in the other ponds just haven’t had enough time to show any adaptations to salt, he says–if you came back and studied the frogs again in five or 10 years, maybe the frogs from the second-saltiest and third-saltiest ponds would also show some kind of adaptation.

Adaptations to new environmental conditions may often come with drawbacks, too. For example, Relyea has also found that zooplankton seem capable of adapting to high salt content—but when they do, they lose all sense of their circadian rhythm, or internal clock.

“They have no idea what time of day it is,” he says.

But these salt-tolerant frogs seem to be doing ok. In addition to seeing how long these tadpoles could survive in salty water, the team also tracked their growth, development and activity. They didn’t find any significant difference between the populations, though they did notice that saltier water seemed to make all of the tadpoles slightly less active.

This study adds to the growing collection of research on wood frogs and salt tolerance, which has yielded some contrasting results. For example, the new paper noted that while researchers in Connecticut have found that wood frogs from high-salt ponds were less likely to survive and slower to develop, researchers in Vermont have found that wood frogs from high-salt ponds might actually be larger and better at moving around.

Future research could tease out exactly how salt is affecting wood frogs and other wildlife. But Relyea notes that some of those other freshwater species, like plankton, can be way more sensitive to salt than the frogs seem to be. So, he adds, it’s important to work on limiting how much of that salt makes it to these ponds and wetlands in the first place–which not only helps to protect the environment, but also saves taxpayer money.

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Imagine walking down the street and encountering a real-life Squirtle. Can you picture how much it would weigh? Are you running away or stopping to pet the turtle-like creature? Well, before you answer, consider that a real-life Squirtle would weigh about the same as a koala—about 19.8 pounds (or 9 kilograms).

In our latest video, we used the Pokédex to find the exact weights of 11 of our favorite Pokémon, and then match them up in a 3D comparison with real animals that share the same weights.

Want more Popular Science videos? Check out “The $15,000 A.I. From 1983” and “The Buried Treasure That Took Us To The Moon.” And don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube.

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An enormous asteroid crashed into the Earth about 65 million years ago. While terrestrial dinosaurs like the famed Tyrannosaurus rex were wiped out, many avian animals really began to flourish. Considering that there are more than 10,000 species of birds on Earth, flourish may even be an understatement. Keeping birds organized in a neat family tree is a bit of a Herculean task, since there are so many species and their evolution has been a little unclear. However, some advances in genomic sequencing and analysis are beginning to create a more lucid picture of how the planet’s living dinosaurs evolved.

In two studies published April 1 in the journals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and Nature, scientists reveal that a genetic event about 65 million years ago has misled them about the true history of avian evolution. A section of one chromosome hasn’t mixed together with nearby DNA as it should have. This section is only tiny fraction of the bird genome, but was enough to make it difficult for scientists to build a more detailed bird family tree.  

A sticky chunk of DNA

In 2014, advances in computer technology used to study genomes helped scientists piece together a family tree for the Neoaves. This group includes the majority of bird species. Using the genomes of 48 species, they split the Neoaves into two major categories. Doves and flamingos were in one group and all the other bird species belonged to the other group. 

When a similar genetic analysis was repeated using 363 bird species for this new study, the team saw a different family tree emerge. This one points to four main groups and reveals that flamingos and doves are more distantly related and it all came back to a specific spot in the chromosomes.

[Related: Birds are so specialized to their homes, it shows in their bones.]

Within these two family trees, the team looked for explanations that could tell them which one was correct. They found one spot on the genome, where the genes were not as mixed together as they should have been over millions of years of sexual reproduction. 

“When we looked at the individual genes and what tree they supported, all of a sudden it popped out that all the genes that support the older tree, they’re all in one spot,” a co-author of the study published in PNAS and University of Florida biologist Edward Braun said in a statement. “That’s what started the whole thing.”

Birds combine genes from a father and a mother into the next generation, but they first mix the genes they inherited from their parents when creating sperm and eggs. This process is called recombination and it is also something that occurs in humans. Recombination maximizes a species’ genetic diversity by ensuring that no two siblings are exactly the same.

One section of one chromosome did not mix with DNA nearby like it should have and has basically spent millions of years frozen in time. This chromosomal section makes up only two percent of the bird genome, but was enough to convince scientists that most birds could be grouped into two major categories–Passerera and Columbea. This new and more accurate family tree takes into account that  misleading section of the avian genome and identifies four main groups of birds.

The team also found evidence that this spot on the bird chromosome has suppressed the recombination process since around the time the dinosaurs disappeared. It is not clear if the Cretaceous-tertiary Extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs and these genomic anomalies are related.

The result of this genetic suppression is that the flamingos and doves looked similar to one another in this one sticky chunk of DNA, but two groups are actually more distantly related when looking at their entire genomes. Flamingos and doves can now be considered more distantly related genetically. According to the team, this kind of stuck genetic mystery could be lurking in the genomes of other organisms. 

Building a better bird family tree

The study published in Nature details an intricate chart detailing 93 million years of evolutionary relationships between 363 bird species, or about 92 percent of all bird families. This updated family tree revealed patterns in the evolutionary history of birds following the Cretaceous-tertiary Extinction.

[Related: Dinosaurs may have evolved into birds, but early flights didn’t go so well.]

The researchers noticed sharp increases in effective population size, substitution rates, and relative brain size in early birds. These evolutionary changes shed new light on the adaptive mechanisms that drove the diversification of bird species in the aftermath of this planet-altering extinction event. 

To do this, they harnessed the power of a suite of computer algorithms known as ASTRAL. This program helps infer evolutionary relationships quickly and accurately and enables the team to integrate the genomic data from more than 60,000 regions in bird genomes. They then examine the evolutionary history of individual segments across the genome and pieced together several gene trees to build out a larger species tree. 

“We found that our method of adding tens of thousands of genes to our analysis was actually necessary to resolve evolutionary relationships between bird species,” study co-author and University of California, San Diego computer engineer Siavash Mirarab said in a statement. “You really need all that genomic data to recover what happened in this certain period of time 65-67 million years ago with high confidence.”

These computational methods also helped the team shed light on that same particular section of one chromosome in the bird genome that has remained unchanged over millions of years and made it difficult for scientists to study these changes. 

“What’s surprising is that this period of suppressed recombination could mislead the analysis,” said Braun. “And because it could mislead the analysis, it was actually detectable more than 60 million years in the future. That’s the cool part.” 

In future studies, similar computer models could help reconstruct evolutionary trees for a variety of other animals. The team is hoping to continue their efforts to build a more complete picture of bird evolution. Biologists are also continuing to sequence the genomes of other bird species in an effort to expand their family tree even more. 

The work is part of the international Bird 10,000 Genomes (B10K) Project, a multi-institutional effort with the goal of generating draft genome sequences for about 10,500 living bird species.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In the North Sea, nearly 100 meters underwater, the seafloor is littered with more than 40,000 shallow pits in the sand. The pockmarks, sometimes spanning more than 10 meters, come in a variety of sizes and odd shapes. While some look like long furrows, half-moons, or concentric circles of sand, others are ringed by mounds of sediment.

When he first saw the pockmarks, Jens Schneider von Deimling, a marine geophysicist at the University of Kiel in Germany, wondered whether they were evidence of methane seeping from the sediment. Methane seeps are often sites of unique seafloor communities that live off the gas the way plants live off sunlight. Methane is also a short-lived but potent, climate change–inducing molecule: over just 20 years, the greenhouse gas can trap 84 times more heat than carbon dioxide. So if a lot of methane were bubbling out of the North Sea, scientists would want to know about it.

But the physical appearance of these seafloor marks weren’t like those seen at typical methane seeps. Gas burping out of the seafloor and into the water tends to leave a distinctly circular pit with a conical bottom. Schneider von Deimling was puzzled. “The [pockmarks] looked really peculiar,” he says. It looked as if someone had disturbed the sand from above.

Schneider von Deimling’s team investigated by analyzing millions of preexisting scans of the area made with a multibeam echo sounder, a piece of equipment that shoots out sound waves and measures how they bounce back—much like how sonar works. The approach gave the scientists highly detailed images of the curious cavities, confirming the pits’ unusual shapes. And when the researchers filmed the seafloor, they couldn’t find any methane-reliant organisms living nearby. The team also made new scans to see how the area changed over a year: not only did new pits appear, but old ones widened or merged with neighbors, a change not usually seen with gas seeps.

Schneider von Deimling was stumped. But his colleagues who study marine mammals offered what is now the scientists’ most likely explanation for the seafloor pits: hungry harbor porpoises.

In previous research, scientists have found grains of sand in the stomachs of stranded harbor porpoises. They’ve also found the remains of sand eels, small fish that bury themselves in the seafloor. Perhaps porpoises are grubbing in the sand to scare sand eels out of hiding, creating these strange pits as they vacuum up their quarry?

So far, it’s just an idea. Researchers know harbor porpoises feed during their long dives, and they’ve seen captive porpoises digging in the sand. But no one has actually caught a wild harbor porpoise in the act of disturbing the seafloor.

Magnus Wahlberg, who studies cetacean biology at the University of Southern Denmark and wasn’t involved in the research, says harbor porpoises are skittish, hard to identify, and difficult to follow. But Wahlberg has seen harbor porpoises poking into stones and algae, likely to reveal small fish, and says the cetaceans change their foraging techniques depending on the available food.

The North Sea is home to many porpoises and many sand eels. “If I were a porpoise, I would definitely spend my time poking around in the sand for them,” says Wahlberg.

Schneider von Deimling says researchers have found similar pits around Ireland’s Aran Islands and in the English Channel, other places with harbor porpoises and sand eels but no underwater gas seeps. He’s now continuing his research studying the seafloor off Canada and New Zealand.

If this foraging behavior is as common as harbor porpoises—there are roughly 700,000 spread around the planet—then identifying porpoise habitat could be as simple as looking for the holes they dig.

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

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Scientists have discovered a new species of gecko named for post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. A team of scientists from the Thackeray Wildlife Foundation were exploring the Southern Western Ghats in southern India when they came across this unusual lizard. The back of Cnemaspis vangoghi reminded them of one of the world’s most famous paintings. The new species is described in a study published March 27 in the journal ZooKeys. 

“Cnemaspis vangoghi is named for Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) as the striking colouration of the new species is reminiscent of one of his most iconic paintings, The Starry Night,” study co-author and biologist Ishan Agarwal said in a statement. 

The males of this species boast a yellow head and forebody, with light blue spots on their back. They live among the rocks in this mountainous and rainforest covered region and occasionally are found on buildings and trees. Scientists don’t currently know what Cnemaspis vangoghi eats, but other geckos eat crickets, earthworms, waxworms, mealworms, moths, fruit flies, or grasshoppers. Some geckos will also eat fruit, including papaya, pineapple, and grapes. 

[Related: This tiny robot grips like a gecko and scoots like an inchworm.]

Genetic sequencing helped the team determine that this is a new species of gecko. There are roughly 1,500 known gecko species around the world. These lizards are found on every continent except for Antarctica, but are especially prevalent in warmer climates. Ishan Agarwal and colleagues Akshay Khandekar and Tejas Thackeray found the new species during an April 2022 expedition in Tamil Nadu, India. 

“Tamil Nadu is an exceptionally biodiverse state and we expect to name well over 50 new species of lizards by the time we are done [with our expeditions]!,” said Agarwal. “I also had more than 500 tick bites during that summer trip, with the highest densities in the low-elevation, dry forests of Srivilliputhur, where the new species are found.”

Cnemaspis vangoghi is a small gecko that can get up to only one to two inches in length. The largest known gecko in the world is the New Caledonian gecko. They are exclusively found on the islands of New Caledonia in the South Pacific and can grow up to 14 inches long. 

[Related: This 6-inch-long Jurassic creature does a great lizard impersonation.]

Cnemaspis vangoghi was described as new to science with another species in the same genus named Cnemaspis sathuragiriensis. This other gecko is named for its locality the Sathuragiri Hills.

“The two new species are distributed in low elevation [820 to 1,312 feet], deciduous forests of Srivilliputhur, and add to the five previously known endemic vertebrates from Srivilliputhur-Megamalai Tiger Reserve, Tamil Nadu, India,” said Agarwal.

Both species are also diurnal, meaning they are primarily active during the cool hours in the early morning. They have only been found in very restricted locations, which makes them an  “an interesting case of micro-endemism in low-elevation species,” according to Agarwal. 

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The brain’s ability to create and store memories is pretty mysterious. Memory can’t always be trusted, and yet it is crucial to survival. Remembering where food is stored during lean winter months is a necessity for many animals, including black-capped chickadees. New research suggests that these birds with impeccable memories use a system similar to something you’ve probably seen at the grocery store. They appear to memorize each food location using brain cell activity that functions similar to how a barcode works. The findings are described in a study published March 29 in the journal Cell.

“We see the world through our memories of objects, places and people,” study co-author and Columbia University neuroscientist Dmitriy Aronov said in a statement. “Memories entirely define the way we see and interact with the world. With this bird, we have a way to understand memory in an incredibly simplified way, and in understanding their memory, we will understand something about ourselves.”

‘Memory geniuses’

Scientists have long known that the brain’s hippocampus is necessary for storing episodic memories like where a car is parked or food is kept. It’s been more difficult to understand how these memories are encoded in the brain, since it’s hard to know what an animal might be remembering at a particular time. 

To work around this problem, the new study looks at black-capped chickadees. Arnov calls these birds “memory geniuses” and masters of episodic memory. Most chickadees live in colder places and don’t migrate in the winter like other birds. Their survival hinges on remembering where they hid food in the summer and fall, with some birds making up to 5,000 of these stashes every day.

[Related: Dogs and wolves remember where you hide their food.]

“Each cache is a well-defined, overt, and easily observable moment in time during which a new memory is formed,” said Aronov. “By focusing on these special moments in time, we were able to identify patterns of memory-related activity that had not been noticed before.”

A hippocampal ‘barcode’

In the study, the team built indoor arenas in a lab that were inspired by the birds’ natural habitats. During the experiments, a black-capped chickadee instinctively hid sunflower seeds in the holes in the arenas, while the team monitored the activity in the bird’s hippocampus, using an implanted recording system. This device allowed the team to monitor the brain while the birds moved about freely and was removed between recording sessions. At the same time, six cameras recorded the chickadees as they flew and an artificial intelligence system that automatically tracked them as they stashed and retrieved seeds. 

“These are very striking patterns of activity, but they’re very brief—only about a second long on average,” study co-author and postdoctoral research fellow Selmaan Chettih said in a statement. “If you didn’t know exactly when and why they happened, it would be very easy to miss them.” 

They saw that the hippocampal neurons fired in a unique pattern each time the chickadees stored food in a certain location. Each memory was tagged with a unique pattern in the hippocampus that lit up when the bird retrieved the cached food. The team referred to these patterns as barcodes since they are very specific labels of individual memories. 

“For example, barcodes of two different caches are uncorrelated even if those two caches are right next to each other,” said Aronov.

These barcode-like patterns also occur independently from the other activity of hippocampal neurons called place cells. These cells encode memories of locations in the brain. Each of these pseudo barcode stayed distinct, even for the stashes that were hidden at the same place, but at different times, or at nearby stashes that were made in quick succession. 

“Many hippocampal studies have focused on place cells, with the Nobel Prize awarded for their discovery in 2014,” said Aronov. “So the assumption in the field was that episodic memory must have something to do with changes in place cells. We find that place cells don’t actually change when birds form new memories. Instead, during food caching, there are additional patterns of activity beyond those seen with place cells.”

What this could mean for humans

According to the team, the question of whether and how these patterns are being used by the brain to drive behavior remains. It is not fully clear whether the chickadees activate the ‘barcodes’ and use those memories to make decisions about where to go next. 

[Related: Do cats and dogs remember their past?]

In future studies, the team hope to see if the birds activate these barcode-esque patterns when looking for caches in more remote spots or in more complicated environments. They also plan to record brain activity while the birds make choices about which cache to visit. 

The team is also eager to know if this barcoding tactic is in widespread use among other animals–ourselves included, since memory is a critical part of the human experience. 

“If you think about how people define themselves, who they think they are, their sense of self, then episodic memories of particular events are central to that,” said Chettih. “That’s what we’re trying to understand.”

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Nature’s brutality is as jarring as its beauty, and nowhere is that on display more than in the 2024 World Nature Photography Awards.

Photographer Alexander Brackx was in Kenya when he witnessed a wildlife encounter that will remain seared into his memory forever. “That morning, we decided to follow four cheetahs on the hunt,” Brackx said. “We followed them for hours. We passed herds of topis, gazelles, and zebras. We knew something was going to happen. When, five hours later, our Maasai guide whispered, ‘they are going for the zebras,’ I was convinced they would attack the topis or gazelles dotted across the valley. Seconds later, the cheetahs burst into a small group of zebras. One cheetah ran towards us, clinging onto a foal. In those seconds, I took this picture of the mother zebra launching a last attempt to push her foal away from the attacking cheetah. She failed. I will remember those last seconds for the rest of my life.”

[Related: New tiny gecko species named after Vincent van Gogh]

The resulting photograph (seen below) took home first prize in the Behavior-Mammals category.

Tracey Lund took top honors overall, being named World Nature Photographer of the Year for her underwater image of two gannets battling for a fish in the Shetland Islands. Lund’s riveting image also offers a reminder that capturing the perfect shot requires persistence, with Lund saying, “An unbelievable spectacle to witness, let alone photograph. I took 1800 images on that day but only had 2 that I could use.”

All the honored photographs from this year’s competition are also available to purchase as wall art.

The post 18 beautiful and jarring wildlife photos that remind us nature is fierce appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Human technology has long drawn inspiration from the natural world: The first airplanes were modeled after birds. The designer of Velcro was inspired by the irksome burrs he often had to pick off his dog. And in recent years, engineers eager to explore the world’s oceans have been taking cues from the creatures that do it best: fish.

Around the world, researchers developing robots that look and swim like fish say their aquatic automatons are cheaper, easier to use, and less disruptive to sea life than the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) scientists use today. In a recent review of the technology’s advances, scientists claim only a few technical problems stand in the way of a robotic fish revolution.

Over the past few decades, engineers have designed prototype robotic fish for a variety of purposes. While some are built to carry out specific tasks—such as tricking other fish in a lab, simulating fish hydrodynamics, or gathering plastics from the ocean—the majority are designed to traverse the seas while collecting data. These robotic explorers are typically equipped with video cameras to document any life forms they encounter and sensors to measure depth, temperature, and acidity. Some of these machines—including a robotic catfish named Charlie, developed by the CIA—can even take and store water samples.

While modern ROVs can already do all these tasks and more, the review’s authors argue that robotic fish will be the tools of the future.

“The jobs done by existing [ROVs] can be done by robotic fish,” says Weicheng Cui, a marine engineer at Westlake University in China and a coauthor of the review. And “what cannot be done by existing ROVs may [also] be done by robotic fish.”

Since the invention of the first tethered ROV in 1953—a contraption named Poodle—scientists have increasingly relied on ROVs to help them reach parts of the ocean that are too deep or dangerous for scuba divers. ROVs can go to depths that divers can’t reach, spend a virtually unlimited amount of time there, and bring back specimens, both living and not, from their trips.

While ROVs have been a boon for science, most models are large and expensive. The ROVs used by scientific organizations, such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, and OceanX, can weigh nearly as much as a rhinoceros and cost millions of dollars. Such large, high-end ROVs also require a crane to deploy and must be tethered to a mother ship while in the water.

In contrast, robotic fish are battery-powered bots that typically weigh only a few kilograms and cost a couple thousand dollars. Although some have been designed to resemble real fish, robotic fish typically come in neutral colors and resemble their biological counterparts in shape only. Yet, according to Tsam Lung You, an engineer at the University of Bristol in England who was not involved in the review, even the most unrealistic robot fish are less disruptive to aquatic life than the average ROV.

Unlike most ROVs that use propellers to get around, robotic fish swim like the animals that inspired them. Flexing their tails back and forth, robotic fish glide through the water quietly and don’t seem to disturb the surrounding marine life—an advantage for researchers looking to study underwater organisms in their natural environments.

Because robotic fish are small and stealthy, scientists may be able to use them to observe sensitive species or venture into the nooks and crannies of coral reefs, lava tubes, and undersea caves. Although robotic fish are highly maneuverable, current models have one big downside: their range is very limited. With no mother ship to supply them with power and limited room to hold batteries, today’s robotic fish can only spend a few hours in the water at a time.

For robotic fish to make modern ROVs obsolete, they’ll need a key piece that’s currently missing: a docking station where they can autonomously recharge their batteries. Cui envisions a future where schools of small robotic fish work together to accomplish big tasks and take turns docking at underwater charging stations powered by a renewable energy source, like wave power.

“Instead of one [ROV], we can use many robotic fish,” Cui says. “This will greatly increase the efficiency of deep-sea operations.”

This potential future relies on the development of autonomous underwater charging stations, but Cui and his colleagues believe these can be built using existing technologies. The potential docking station’s core, he says, would likely be a wireless charging system. Cui says this fishy future could come to fruition in under a decade if the demand is great enough.

Still, getting scientists to trade in their ROVs for schools of robotic fish may be a tough sell, says Paul Clarkson, the director of husbandry operations at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California.

“For decades, we’ve benefited from using the remotely operated vehicles designed and operated by our research and technology partner, MBARI,” says Clarkson. “Their ROVs are an essential part of our work and research, and the capabilities they provide make them an irreplaceable tool.”

That said, he adds, “with the threats of climate change, habitat destruction, overfishing, and plastic pollution, we need to consider what advantages new innovations may offer in understanding our changing world.”

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

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Everybody poops, as the saying goes. So it’s easy to think of poop as a class unifier that brings animals together across divides. Scientifically speaking though, it’s not–at least when it comes to hyenas. Spotted hyenas of high and low social status have acquired epigenetic differences, detectable in their scat, according to new research. In other words: Biologists can discriminate between high and low ranking hyenas through feces analysis, finding “molecular signatures of social status,” per a study published March 28 in the journal Communications Biology.

In hyena society, some individuals dominate over others. The resulting ranks determine how animals interact and acquire food. Higher status hyenas can be seen as more popular, engaging in more frequent and successful social contact. They also have to put in less work to eat. The new study shows these social norms have far-reaching effects, even altering how an animal’s DNA is expressed.

When the environment affects genes

These DNA alterations come in the form of epigenetic changes, or shifts in how genes are expressed in response to environmental conditions. At 149 epigenetic sites within gut cells extracted from scat samples, high status and low status hyenas show significant differences.  Between the two groups of animals, consistent variations in DNA methylation–a process where methyl groups bind to regions of the genome within a cell, and silence certain genes–are detectable. 

Lots of things influence DNA methylation–much of it is inherited, but some of it is acquired throughout life. Things like food availability, activity level, stress, competition, or exposure to pollutants can all prompt changes in methylation, and thus gene expression. Once epigenetic changes have occurred, some can be passed down to the next generation.

In hyenas and a few other species of animals, prior research has hinted that social status can lead to epigenetic shifts. The new study builds on that previous work, confirming the phenomenon in a clan of wild hyenas with novel methods, identifying the genes modulated by methylation, and showing changes in both cubs and adults. The study adds to the growing body of evidence that the social environment plays a significant role in animal and human health and physiology, leaving a long-term mark on DNA. 

It’s a “well done study” that improves on past work with more sensitive techniques, says Christopher Faulk, an associate professor of genetics at University of Minnesota who was uninvolved in the new research. Faulk previously contributed to research on DNA methylation in spotted hyenas, but he says that, thanks to advances in genetic science and the clever idea of turning to scat instead of blood or organ tissue, the new study represents “an impressive technical feat.” 

“If we were to re-do our study today, we would have done it exactly this way. I think it [uses] excellent methods,” he adds.

Molecular traces of social order

Hyenas live in female-dominated clans organized under a strict social hierarchy. Higher-status individuals subordinate lower-status ones, and rank is passed down from mother to daughter. The social order determines things like how conflicts are resolved and also how far an individual has to travel to forage–higher status animals have priority to closer food sources, while low-status hyenas have to commute longer distances.

It’s these differences in resource access that the scientists hypothesize are triggering epigenetic changes, even for young cubs. Low-status mothers traveling for food spend less time nursing their offspring than mothers that get to stay closer to the den, explains senior study author Alexandra Weyrich, head of wildlife epigenetics at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany. “It’s a very early imprint” of social status, she says. 

Weyrich and her co-author’s findings support that idea. The biologists collected and analyzed fresh scat samples from 42 different hyenas, 18 high-ranking females and 24 low-ranking females–both cubs and adults. They extracted DNA from gut epithelial cells in the poop piles and identified 149 regions of differential methylation between the high and low status groups. Much of epigenetic work relies on more invasive methods, like drawing blood or taking tissue samples. By using feces, the researchers were able to avoid stressing or endangering the study subjects. “We didn’t have to interfere with the animals,” Weyrich says. “This [method] has never been done before [in the wild]…it opens up a big way forward for other researchers that work on wild species as well.”

Many of the genes the researchers homed in on through their analyses are related to energy conversion, the immune system, and gut-brain communication–signaling that the food access and other status differences have long-term effects on hyena metabolism and health. They further found methylation differences in both cubs and adults, with new epigenetic changes emerging in maturity. In a complementary series of tests performed on samples from the same clan, the study authors were able to identify whether a hyena was high- or low-ranking from methylation signatures alone with 80% accuracy. Though compelling, the study relies on a small sample size of associated hyenas. “It’s a nice result,” says Weyrich, “but it needs to be tested on other populations” to prove the pattern, she adds.

From hyenas to humans

“Wild hyenas actually serve as a fantastic model for humans,” says Faulk, because of their nuanced social dynamics and behavioral complexity. He conducts lots of epigenetic studies in laboratory mice, but says hyenas offer a different level of insight. “They’re not under the artificial manipulation of either a laboratory or domestication.” 

Lots of research in humans and rodent studies indicates that early life experiences can lead to epigenetic shifts. Though it’s not a direct one-to-one comparison, the new study “can be extrapolated” to people, says Weyrich. “We have to be a bit cautious,” she adds–noting that more research would be needed and that the exact gene regions under epigenetic pressure may differ, but the study does suggest social rank and resource access have significant bearing on mammal gene expression. Despite the specifics of different species’ social hierarchies, if it’s happening in hyenas, it could be happening in humans too. 

“This hyena research directly contributes to our understanding of how the human social environment might impact our health and risk of disease,” says Faulk. “It’s a very useful and important line of study.”

Update 03/28/2024 1:29PM: Some terminology has been adjusted to clarify the difference between epigenetic and genetic change and more accurately describe hyena social structure.

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Avian influenza or bird flu has been detected in milk from dairy cows in Kansas and Texas for the first time. Officials from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Texas Animal Health Commission confirmed that the Type A H5N1 strain of bird flu virus was present in some samples of unpasteurized milk. This particular strain is known to cause devastating outbreaks in wild and commercial birds and can occasionally infect people. H5N1 is also affecting older dairy cows in New Mexico and causes decreased lactation and low appetite in the animals.

“At this stage, there is no concern about the safety of the commercial milk supply or that this circumstance poses a risk to consumer health,” the USDA wrote in a statement.

The commercial milk supply is still safe and the risk to people is low, according to the USDA. Dairies must only send the milk from healthy animals into the food chain, with milk from infected or sick animals diverted. The pasteurization process also kills viruses and other bacteria and this process is required for milk that is sold through interstate commerce.

[Related: Seal pup die-off from avian flu in Argentina looks ‘apocalyptic.’]

The tests on the cattle did not find any changes to the virus that indicate it would make it spread more easily to people. Texas dairy farmers first became concerned about three weeks ago when their cattle began falling ill. It is likely related to the current outbreak of a highly pathogenic avian influenza strain called H5N1 that has killed millions of birds and been detected in mammals including elephant seals and a polar bear in Alaska. 

“It’s important for people to know that at this point, there are still a lot of unanswered questions,” influenza pathologist Richard Webby tells PopSci. “It’s still a very unusual and interesting finding. These cows are not hosts we typically associate with avian influenza viruses.” 

Webby is the Deputy Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds and faculty member in the Department of Infectious Diseases at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. According to Webby, the risk to the general population still remains low and studying the cattle is providing scientists with an opportunity to learn more about how the virus spreads, as domestic cows are easy to sample and track in studies.

“In the whole gamut of influenza viruses that make their home in birds, most don’t cause a whole lot of disease,” says Webby. “There are two groups within that (H5N1 and H7N1) that have this ability to make mutations in one of their proteins that makes them much more able to cause a systemic infection.”

These highly pathogenic forms make it easier for the virus to move away from just the lungs and infect other organs and tissues in the body. Webby also points out that as far as viruses go, influenza can be fairly weak, so pasteurization should remain a strong line of defense. Consuming raw or unpasteurized milk is dangerous, no matter what the internet says. Scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say that raw milk has no added nutritional benefits and it can be contaminated with harmful germs. The CDC even considers raw milk one of the riskiest foods you can consume. 

“It doesn’t survive long under heat. So from that perspective, it’s a good thing that it’s pretty easy to kill flu viruses,” says Webby. 

University of Texas Medical Branch epidemiologist Gregory Gray, told Science that the new detections in cows across multiple states was a “worrisome” development. Gray said it may be a sign that the virus is spreading between cattle instead of from birds alone and has mutated in ways that could make the virus easier to spread among humans. However, the National Veterinary Services Laboratories said that the preliminary studies on the affected cows show no evidence that the virus has changed.  

Bird flu spreads through air droplets and bird feces. According to the Wildlife Conservation Society, it is exacerbated by alterations to bird migration schedules due to human-caused climate change and repeated re-circulation in domestic poultry. There have also been outbreaks of the virus at mink farms in France and Spain and the USDA banned poultry imports from France in October 2023. Scientists confirmed that this virus jumped to wild mammals in May 2022.

[Related: Thriving baby California condor is a ray of hope for the unique species.]

According to USDA and Texas officials, the cows likely contracted the virus from infected wild birds. The infected livestock appear to recover on their own within seven to 10 days, which is very different from how this illness affects commercial poultry. Entire bird flocks must be culled to get rid of the virus. About 82 million wild and commercial birds in the United States have been affected since 2022. 

While the risk to humans is still low, the World Health Organization has urged public health officials to prepare for a potential spillover to humans in the future. Scientists initially thought that mammals could only catch the virus through contact with infected birds. While cases of humans getting infected and seriously ill from bird flu are rare, the more it spreads among mammals, the easier it will be for the virus to evolve to spread.

Since this situation is evolving quickly, the USDA and other health agencies will continue to share updates. More information on biosecurity measures can be found here.

UPDATE April 2, 2024 9:57 a.m. EDT

According to Texas health officials, at least one person has been diagnosed with bird flu after interacting with infected cows. The CDC said there are currently no signs that the virus has evolved methods that help it spread more easily among humans, but the situation is continuing to evolve.

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Humans are not the funniest members of the animal kingdom. Absolutely not.

Sure, we have knock-knock jokes and Netflix specials, but it’s our feathered and furry friends that really bring in the laughs. Nowhere is that on display more than with the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. The annual competition has been celebrating the goofy antics of animals for nearly a decade. And to celebrate a new partnership with Nikon for the 2024 edition, they’ve shared 10 never-before-seen images from last year’s entries.

Professional photographers Paul Joynson-Hicks MBE and Tom Sullam founded the competition in 2015, determined to share the hilarious joy of wildlife and bring attention to much-needed conservation efforts. Entries for the 2024 Nikon Comedy Wildlife Photo Awards are open until July 31.

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Non-verbal gestures are an integral part of how humans and some other organisms communicate, as with various sign languages  and expressing emotions. A small-bird species called the Japanese tit (Parus minor) also may also use this more complex form of communication. In a study published March 25 Current Biology, a team from the University of Tokyo describes how this small bird appears to use this wing to say “after you” to indicate that the other bird.

According to the study, when a mating pair arrives at their nest box carrying food, the two will wait outside. One bird will then often flutter its wings towards the other, apparently indicating that the other bird can enter the home first. 

The team believes that this discovery challenges earlier beliefs that only a few species use gestures to communicate. Chimpanzees, bonobos, ravens, and some fish appear to use a form of communication called deictic gesturing. This is when simple gestures are deployed to point out objects or show something of interest. Symbolic gestures, such as how humans use an open hand to signal “after you,” requires more complex cognitive skills and have been difficult to observe.

CREDIT: Suzuki and Sugita, 2024/ Current Biology

“In our latest discovery, we revealed that the Japanese tit uses gestures to communicate with their mate,” study co-author and University of Tokyo animal linguist and biologist Toshitaka Suzuki said in a statement. “For over 17 years, I have been engaged in the study of these fascinating birds. They not only use specific calls to convey particular meanings, but also combine different calls into phrases using syntactic rules. These diverse vocalizations led me to initiate this research into their potential use of physical gestures.”

[Related: Why do humans talk? Tree-dwelling orangutans might hold the answer.]

During the spring, these birds form mating pairs and build their nests inside a tree cavity with a small entrance. In the study, Suzuki and his co-researcher Norimasa Sugita observed the behavior of 16 parent birds (eight pairs) breeding in nest boxes built in the wild. The birds enter one at a time when feeding their nestlings. The team noticed that when they’re carrying food back to the nest, the birds would often find a perch nearby first. Then, one would flutter its wings towards the other.

The team analyzed over 320 nest visitations in detail and observed that the wing-fluttering display promoted the mate who was being fluttered at the go into the nest box first. The other bird who fluttered entered second, seeming to mirror the “after you” gesture that humans sometimes use. 

“We were surprised to find that the results were much clearer than we had expected,” said Suzuki. “We observed that Japanese tits flutter their wings exclusively in the presence of their mate, and upon witnessing this behavior, the mate almost always entered the nest box first.”

Female birds performed the gesture more often than males and male birds usually entered the nest box first, regardless of which bird arrived first. Females usually entered the nest box first if she didn’t flutter her wings. 

[Related: Artificial intelligence is helping scientists decode animal languages.]

The team believes this behavior should be classified as a symbolic gesture. It only occurred in the presence of a mat, stopped after the mate entered the nest box, and encouraged the mate to enter without any physical contact. The wing-fluttering “after-you” gesture was also aimed at the mate and not the nest box, meaning that it wasn’t being used to point out where something of interest was located.

“There is a hypothesis that walking on two legs allowed humans to maintain an upright posture, freeing up their hands for greater mobility, which in turn contributed to the evolution of gestures,” said Suzuki. “Similarly, when birds perch on branches, their wings become free, which we think may facilitate the development of gestural communication.”

The team says that they will continue to look into what birds are talking about to learn more about animal languages and the evolution of human speech. 

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In late July, dozens of brown bears congregate at Brooks Falls, in Katmai National Park and Preserve on the Alaska Peninsula, to gorge on sockeye salmon catapulting their bright red bodies upstream to reach their spawning waters.

Enchanted, I stand with a crowd of tourists on a wooden viewing platform, observing as dominant bears score spots at the top of the falls, and leggy subadults patrol the banks for leftover carcasses. A 350-kilogram male submerges in the frothy pool of water beneath the falls, surfacing with a salmon 10 seconds later. He clutches the fish between his two front paws, as if praying, then skins it whole.

I’ve always dreamed of traveling to see the bears of Brooks Falls, a destination for up to 37,000 visitors each year. But I’ve come now for a much smaller, lesser-known mammal—one that will take the stage when the sun sets and the dusky, dying light calls forth a groundswell of mosquitoes.

Meet Myotis lucifugus, commonly referred to as the little brown bat. Or, as chiropterologist (bat researcher) Jesika Reimer fondly calls it, “the flying brown bear.” Little brown bats share many similar physiological and behavioral traits with Ursus arctos. Both are slow-reproducing mammals that can live for many decades in the wild. Both feed in a frenzy through the summer and autumn months to prepare for a winter in torpor, a state of metabolic rest. Yet the little brown bat weighs less than 10 grams.

“They’re so small and we’re so oblivious to them,” muses Reimer. “That’s why I love bats so much.”

Several hours after observing the bears, I meet Reimer a short distance from the falls at a log cabin that houses US National Park Service staff in Brooks Camp. She flicks on her headlamp and scans a mist net she’s erected outside—black mesh so fine it’s nearly invisible, strung between metal poles that stand six meters tall. Somewhere above us, as many as 300 female little brown bats jostle in the cabin’s warm, safe attic where they have gathered for the summer to birth and rear pups—an arrangement called a maternity colony. Tonight, at the 58th parallel, with just four to five hours of true darkness, Reimer aims to capture a few in hopes of solving a long-standing mystery.

Perhaps because bats so easily evade human awareness, scientists know little about where those that live at this far northern margin of the species’ range spend their time through the winter months. To find some answers, Reimer is leading the first-ever gene-flow study of maternity colonies in Alaska outside of the state’s more temperate southeastern arm. How interconnected are these Myotis lucifugus populations, she wonders? And where, exactly, are they hibernating?

We hear a fluttering from the cabin’s awning, and Reimer’s handheld acoustic monitoring device picks up a rapid-fire pulse of echolocation—high-frequency sounds that bats produce to navigate and find food. Not long after, one snags in the net. With expert precision, Reimer gently disentangles the creature. It squints up at us, its snout squished-looking and its black ears nearly as big as its head. It’s smaller than I had imagined, just nine centimeters long. Reimer turns the bat over in her palm and gently blows on its pale brown fur. I glimpse a pink nipple. “Lactating female,” Reimer says, then stretches the bat’s black wings wide on a table. “Their wings are basically their hands,” she explains, noting that there are almost exactly the same number of joints in a bat’s wing (25) as in a human hand (27). Then, she gently secures a silver ID band to the bat’s forearm and uses a small tool to extract a pinprick of tissue—genetic material for her study—from each wing.

As she works, she invites several bystanders to take a closer look. “They’re actually so cute,” one exclaims. Another takes a slow-motion video as Reimer releases the bat into the night sky. She says that engaging citizens in research is a vital part of her work to change the dominant narrative about bats, a mammal that many people fear unnecessarily—and one that faces serious conservation threats.

A fungal disease called white-nose syndrome is decimating bats across North America, killing an estimated 6.7 million since it was first detected in upstate New York in 2006. The fungus, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, has been documented in bats in 40 US states, and its known northern spread includes eight Canadian provinces. It thrives in the cool, damp conditions of hibernacula, caves and hollows where hundreds to thousands of bats huddle together for the winter, creeping onto their ears and noses and across their wings, causing lesions and dehydration. Infected bats stir out of torpor to groom themselves, spending precious fat reserves, and often starve to death once they’re depleted.

Recently, in places where the fungus was first detected, subpopulations with genetic resilience are starting to bounce back, but the situation is still dire. The mortality rate of bats with white-nose syndrome can reach as high as 90 to 100 percent, depending on the colony. Canada listed little brown bats as endangered in 2014 due to drastic declines in eastern provinces. The United States is considering listing the species as well.

It’s not a question of if, but when white-nose syndrome will arrive in Alaska, potentially threatening little brown bats here, too. Reimer hopes that the gene-flow study will put biologists one step closer to locating the bats’ winter hibernacula. That way, when white-nose arrives, they will be better able to monitor—and manage—the impacts.

Reimer has spent over a decade specializing in chiropterology, the study of the species with “winged hands.” She was drawn to study bats, in part, because of the way they’ve evolved to fill ecological niches, pollinating specific flowers, distributing fruit and tree seeds that help sustain and regenerate forests, and regulating insect populations.

Bats are incredibly diverse in their adaptations. They’re the only mammal capable of true flight, living on every continent except Antarctica. Next to rodents, bats are the second-largest mammal group in the world, with over 1,400 documented species and counting. These range from massive fruits bats—the size of a small human child—to the tiny bumblebee bat, which weighs in at just two grams. The fish-eating bat, meanwhile, has elongated feet for raking the surface of the water to catch fish and crustaceans. And the Mexican long-tongued bat uses its long, tubular tongue—nearly half the length of its body—to feed on nectar. Bats are the major pollinators of over 500 different plant species, boosting both natural habitats and human agriculture.

Despite these wonders, the bat has an unfair reputation as a “bloodthirsty, rabies-carrying rodent,” Reimer says. “In North America, less than two percent of wild bats test positive for rabies, a number significantly lower than, say, foxes,” she points out. In 2021, only three people in the United States died from rabies contracted from bats.

And even when bats aren’t feared, they’re often overlooked. Many scientists and conservation organizations favor more charismatic megafauna: wolves, humpback whales, and, no doubt, brown bears. But Reimer likes an underdog. “I’d much rather go hike in the woods and look at things no one else has cared about,” she says. “I want to ask the questions that haven’t yet been asked.”

Reimer grew up in Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories (NWT), worked as a tree planter in northern Alberta, and tromped along caribou trails as a research technician in Greenland. She fell in love with bats as an ecology major at the University of Calgary in southern Alberta, studying the diets of bats killed by wind turbines. But she always longed to return to the North.

Then, in 2010, cavers stumbled upon an enormous bat hibernaculum in a cave system nestled in the boreal forest outside Fort Smith, NWT, where thousands of little browns were overwintering. Reimer had found her ticket home. She spent several seasons there studying bats at their maternity colonies, conducting acoustic monitoring and capture surveys. Her research showed that, at the 60th parallel, little brown bats exit torpor at cooler temperatures and give birth later than their counterparts in the US lower 48—likely a physical response to the northern environment. Eventually, Reimer migrated west to take a research position with the Alaska Center for Conservation Science at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and she began locating and collecting data from maternity colonies in Alaska.

The little brown is one of the most widely distributed bat species in North America, found in all states, provinces, and territories except Nunavut, where the forests that the bats favor shrink into tundra. Though five other resident bat species are found in southeast Alaska, the little brown bat is the only documented species north of this region, with a known range extending all the way to the 64th parallel.

When Reimer moved to Alaska, she and her colleagues had only scant knowledge of the behaviors of little brown bats there. Some scientists weren’t even sure if mist netting would be possible. But Reimer received regular calls from homeowners about bats roosting in their attics, and the first night she set up a net in Anchorage, she captured dozens. It was clear they were making a home. But how exactly does a nocturnal, hibernating species thrive in a place where true darkness can last less than two hours on summer solstice, and more frigid winters demand heftier fat stores?

Brown bears can gorge all day and night through the summer and fall. But bats rely on darkness to protect them from predators while they forage, and so must pack on fat in short, intense feeding spurts, says Reimer. They also can’t get too fat, or they won’t be able to fly to their hibernaculum when the time comes. Using acoustic monitoring devices to record and analyze feeding frequencies, Reimer has begun to sort out how the bats make it work. For example, in the Far North, they fly at dusk—what Reimer calls “extra-solar flights”—despite greater vulnerability to owls and other raptors.

The cold also poses serious challenges for Myotis lucifugus in Alaska. Not only can little browns get frostbite on the tips of their ears, but food is often more scarce. The species is insectivorous, and individual bats can eat their weight in mosquitoes, moths, midges, and mayflies in a single night. They’re adept at “aerial hawking”—scooping insects into their mouths with their tails or wing membranes. When the temperature plummets, so do available insects, and little browns have adapted to go into torpor as easily as flicking a switch. “If there’s a bad weather event, or no food, bats can save energy rather than go find energy which doesn’t exist,” explains Reimer.

Little brown bats in Alaska have also developed a more diverse diet than southern populations. In 2017, researchers discovered that, in addition to catching arthropods on the wing, they “glean” them from webs and foliage, adding orb-weaver spiders and others to their menu. In the face of climate change and shifting habitats—including the northerly expansion of the treeline—this versatility could be advantageous.

But there’s one thing Reimer hasn’t been able to sort yet. Since 2016, she’s located more than 25 summer maternity colonies. She has yet to find any winter hibernacula.

Twenty kilometers southeast of Brooks Camp, I follow Reimer down a trail that plunges into the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. The slopes are densely forested, a stark contrast to the valley floor, which is covered in pink pyroclastic rock. That’s a result of the 1912 eruption of Novarupta, a magma vent at the base of nearby Mount Katmai—the largest volcanic eruption in the 20th century.

We pass into an airy grove of birch where there’s plenty of space to move between the trees or, if you’re a bat, to fly. “Little browns love open forest canopies like this one for foraging,” Reimer says. “Once you know bat behavior, you start to see their habitat everywhere. You’ve got to think like a bat.”

The chiropterologist is deeply curious about where bats’ minds are leading them on the landscape to hibernate, and whether they’re spending the winter in large or small groups. Some migratory bats travel quite far, Reimer notes. For example, the European Nathusius’ pipistrelle flies over 2,000 kilometers to hibernation areas. After all the samples she’s collecting have been analyzed, she hopes to publish the results next winter. Reimer wonders: Will they indicate some level of genetic isolation among northern Alaskan bats? Or will they show that populations are connected? If connected, that would mean the bats congregate in larger winter colonies, perhaps in a cave somewhere. That would lead to rapid transmission of deadly white-nose syndrome, when it arrives, and add urgency to management efforts.

But Reimer’s hypothesis—and her hope—is that bats here behave differently than their southern counterparts. There’s good reason to think so, based on recent findings in southeast Alaska by biologist Karen Blejwas. Starting in 2011, Blejwas glued radio tags, weighing 0.3 grams, onto dozens of bats from summer roosts near Juneau, Alaska, in hopes of finding their hibernacula. In the late fall, she boarded a fixed-wing plane outfitted with radio telemetry. She flew at sunset, circling where the bats swarmed, waiting for one of them to make a move so she could follow. Sometimes she’d get a signal only to have it disappear. “It was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” recalls Blejwas.

Then, three years after Blejwas began her search, her research team struck gold. The first-known Alaska hibernaculum wasn’t a cave with 1,000 bats; it was a small hollow, tucked beneath rocky scree on the side of a steep ridge, with just a handful of occupants.

Since then, Blejwas has found 10 hibernacula in unassuming places: under tree stumps and mossy rubble, in a jumble of rocks, tucked into upended root balls on toppled trees. She set up trail cameras at some of the sites and observed bats swarming outside and entering their hibernacula. They were all small colonies, ranging in size from one to 12 bats.

Could the same thing be happening around Katmai National Park and in other parts of Alaska, over 1,000 kilometers away? The unique hibernating strategy could make little brown bats here more resilient against disease, Reimer says. “If they’re disconnected populations and using these small cracks and crevices like biologists are seeing in southeastern Alaska, it could potentially slow or halt the spread of white-nose syndrome,” simply by limiting the number of bats it can infect at once. Physiologically, however, little browns in the North are just as vulnerable as populations in the South. They’re a small species without enough fat reserves to outlast the fungus, though one recent study indicates that other factors, such as genetic differences in metabolic rates during hibernation, play a role in determining which individuals survive.

We emerge from the forest and follow the steeply cut bank of the churning and tumbling Ukak River. Reimer stops and points at something across the surging water. I’m not entirely sure what she’s looking at. Then, I see it: a series of cracks and crevices running through the volcanic rock wall, slight enough for a bat to take refuge in.

The sun sets at 10 p.m. in King Salmon, a small fishing community of 300 residents on Alaska’s Bristol Bay. This is the launch point for visiting Katmai National Park, about an hour-long boat ride from Brooks Falls, and Reimer and I are back for one last survey before I leave, driving through the dusk in a Park Service truck to look for promising sites.

We pull in next to a clutch of run-down outbuildings piled with fishing buoys. Reimer hops out to inspect an old storage shed that has “all the ingredients” of a place that bats would love to roost in: it has a high ceiling, an attic, and sun-bleached wooden shakes that bats could easily slide under to take refuge. But she finds only a few dried guano pellets. Despite everything she knows about bat preferences, she confesses that the most reliable way to locate a bat roost is when a homeowner calls to complain about one.

In most cases, homeowners want colonies removed. Living with bats isn’t easy. Hungry juveniles are noisy, and bat urine stinks. Over time, structural damage can occur. And living close to any wildlife can pose some real risks, including the spread of disease, though with bats this is extremely rare. Meanwhile, the benefits of having bats around, such as their being the main predator of disease-spreading, night-flying insects like mosquitoes, are significant and measurable.

Yet, Reimer has heard stories of homeowners firing bear spray into their roofs or pouring bleach into their walls; often, they kill entire colonies. Bats aren’t like mice, which can replenish their numbers quickly by having five to 10 litters per year. And more than 50 percent of bat species, including the little browns, face the risk of steep population decline or extinction over the next 15 years. “Once you exterminate a bat colony, that colony isn’t coming back,” says Reimer. “It would be like killing all the bears at Brooks Falls. The following year, there won’t be any bears.”

So as Reimer works on her surveys, she also works on the public, hoping to help more people learn to appreciate bats. She tells homeowners who report colonies that bats aren’t likely to chew insulation and wires like mice. She also makes sure they know that the bats will depart by late August. She recruits homeowners to participate in efforts to count bats as they emerge for the night—one of the ways researchers get an idea of populations—or to help with one of her capture surveys. Seeing little browns up close and learning about their unique adaptive biology and behaviors often changes people’s minds about them, she says: “They start to care about ‘their’ bats.” And once the bats have left for the winter, homeowners can seal off their homes so that the bats find a more appropriate place the following year.

Before full dark, Reimer gets a gut feeling about the three-story Park Service apartment building where we’ll bunk for the night. We head back and erect mist nets, then set up her field equipment on the tailgate of the truck in the parking lot. It isn’t long before we hear the familiar flutter of wings from the building’s awning. A shadowy form swoops down, arcs back up, dives again, and lands softly in the net. It’s among the last for this particular study—one more unwitting helper in the effort to secure its species’ future in the Far North.

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

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A fascinating photograph of a barnacle-covered soccer ball that traveled thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean took home top honors at the 2024 British Wildlife Photography Awards this month. Photographer Ryan Stalker snapped the image near the shores of Dorset, saying: “Although the ball is waste and should not be in the sea, I do wonder about the journey the ball has been on. From initially being lost, then spending time in the tropics where the barnacles are native and perhaps years in the open ocean before arriving in Dorset.”

The photograph beat out 14,000 other entries across 10 categories to be named the Grand Prize Winner.

“The British Wildlife Photography Awards brings to light the spectacular tapestry of Britain’s natural heritage,” said Will Nicholls, Director of BWPA. “This collection is more than just a gallery of images; it is a celebration, a reminder of the enduring beauty of British wildlife and a call to preserve the natural spaces that we are so fortunate to have in Britain.”

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In a world first, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital successfully transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a person with chronic kidney disease. The historic procedure builds off of decades of research into gene editing of animal organs and could mark an inflection point in efforts to cut down on sometimes fatally lengthy transplant wait times. Recent advances in gene editing technology means procedures like these could become more common. 

The patient, a 62-year-old man from Massachusetts named Richard Slayman, has severe diabetes and hypertension and has been on dialysis for seven years. He eventually received a new kidney from a human donor but it began showing signs of failure after five years. Slayman was on a waiting list for another kidney when his doctors suggested the possibility of receiving an experimental kidney from a gene-edited pig.

“I saw [the transplant] not only as a way to help me, but a way to provide hope for the thousands of people who need a transplant to survive,” Slayman said in a statement. 

The modified pig was engineered by Massachusetts-based biotech firm eGenesis. Scientists used CRISPR gene editing technology to produce a pig with 69 gene modifications. Several of these modifications were meant to remove harmful pig genes that could provoke an immune response from the patent. Human genes were also added to the pig to improve the kidney’s compatibility and lessen the likelihood of the human body rejecting it. 

After around four hours of tense operating, surgeons in the room reportedly said they saw the transplanted kidney producing urine, a key sign the procedure was a success. The room filled with applause and cheers. 

“This represents a new frontier in medicine and demonstrates the potential of genome engineering to change the lives of millions of patients globally suffering from kidney failure,” eGenesis CEO Mike Curtis said in a statement. 

Why are scientists interested in gene-editing animal organs?

Scientists are hopeful that transplanting animal organs into humans, a practice called “xenotransplantation,” could one day supplement human organ transplants and cut down on lengthy transplant wait times. An estimated 36 million people in the US are affected by chronic kidney disease, 800,000 of which have end stage kidney disease or kidney failure according to the Centers for Disease Control. Once at that stage, patients are often forced to choose between going on a dialysis machine that filters their blood or applying for an organ transplant. Over 103,000 people in the US are currently on organ transplant wait list according to the Health Resource and Services Administration (HRSA). 

But lengthy wait times and a limited supply of able organ donors means many of those patients never end up receiving a transplant. The HRSA estimates 17 people die everyday while waiting for a new organ. Those lengthy wait times and lack of donors has also helped fuel an organ black market. 

Potential animal organ transplants aren’t just limited to kidneys. Surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, successfully implanted a gene-modified pig liver into a brain-stem dead person in 2022. Not long after that surgeons from the University of Maryland Medical Center implanted pig hearts into two fatally-ill patients. Though those two surgeries were successful, their end effect was limited. Both patients reportedly died less than two months after the procedures. Human immune systems react violently to organs from other species and try to reject them, an obstacle which makes these procedures particularly challenging.  

“If it were easy, we’d be doing it by now, but it’s not,” MGH Transplant Center Director Joren Madsen said in a statement. “The barrier to pig xenotransplantation is formidable.” 

Still, researchers are hopeful advancements in gene editing could lead to longer lasting benefits. Surgeons have previously transplanted genetically modified kidneys and livers to baboons. In one case, eGenesis claims a monkey implanted with a gene-edited pig kidney lived for two years following the surgery. Surgeons involved with Slayman’s procedure are similarly hoping his new kidneys could help him live for two more years. The FDA fast tracked approval for his particulate procedure as part of its “compassionate use” program intended for patients nearing the ends of their lives. Wider use of this procedure would require full FDA testing and approval. 

And while the historic procedure is both a feat of scientific and medical prowess, surgeons involved say the real credit belongs to the patient for marching into an unknown territory.

“The real hero today is the patient, Mr. Slayman, as the success of this pioneering surgery, once deemed unimaginable, would not have been possible without his courage and willingness to embark on a journey into uncharted medical territory,” MGH Transplant Center Director Joren C. Madsen said in a statement.

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The adjective “fluffy” is not usually one that applies to the billions of bugs that call Earth home. Still, some caterpillars, spiders, and beetles do have longer fuzzy hairs from their many appendages. Now, there is a new genus of fluffy longhorn beetle in Australia that was found by chance and a bit of mistaken identity. The newly discovered Excastra albopilosa (E. albopilosa) is described in a study published March 19 in the  Australian Journal of Taxonomy.

Excastra was initially discovered by entomologist James Tweed while he and his partner were camping in the rainforests of Queensland, Australia. He initially thought the less than an inch long critter with its long white and black hairs was a bit of bird poop. 

“I was walking through the campsite at Binna Burra Lodge one morning and something on a Lomandra leaf caught my eye,” Tweed said in a statement. “To my amazement, I saw the most extraordinary and fluffiest longhorn beetle I had ever seen.” Tweed is an entomologist at the University of Queensland. 

After his trip, Tweed combed through available books, scientific papers, and on the internet to find the name of this species, but his search came up empty. Some photos posted to an Australasian beetles Facebook group sparked some interest, but even the most seasoned insect identifiers were stumped. 

The Australian National Insect Collection in Canberra officially confirmed that the beetle was not only a completely new species, but a new genus. They selected the name Excastra for the genus name, which means “from the camp.” Its species name albopilosa means “white and hairy.”

[Related: Army ants could teach robots a thing or two.]

“We don’t yet know what these hairs are for, but our primary theory is that they make the insect look like it’s been killed by an insect-killing fungus,” said Tweed. “This would possibly deter predators such as birds from eating it, but until someone can find more specimens and study this species further, we won’t be able to say for sure why this beetle is so hairy.”

The area where Excastra was located has been popular with entomologists for over a century and Tweed has not seen it on any additional trips back to the park. These types of chance discovered highlight just how many unknown species are out there and how many may risk going extinct. 

“Insects are the most diverse group of animals on the planet but are also the most underappreciated and understudied,” said Tweed. “Best estimates suggest there may be 5.5 million insect species worldwide and only one-fifth of these have been named and described.”

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When a dog follows a command or fetches a ball, it’s hard to know what’s really going on inside its canine cranium. Do dogs understand and respond to tone of voice, the syllables of words, accompanying hand motions and body language, or just the situational context? Behavioral studies have offered some clues, but new research brings additional evidence that our favorite furry friends really do grasp the meaning behind words. 

Dogs show a pattern of neural activity that seems to indicate they can differentiate between words for different objects, and are even surprised when presented with words and objects that don’t match up, according to a study published March 22 in the journal Current Biology. A team of neuroscientists and animal behavior researchers used non-invasive electroencephalogram (EEG) testing to measure the electrical pulses inside 27 pet dogs’ brains during an experiment involving the dogs’ owners and some well-loved toys. They found an electrical impulse pattern similar to a known signal in humans. The findings shed light on canine noggins and also add to our knowledge of the origins of complex language. 

“It’s wonderful to have studies like this,” says Ellen Lau, a neuroscientist studying linguistics at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the new research. Applying EEG to dogs, instead of the more invasive techniques that are often used to study animal brains, allows for more direct comparisons between humans and non-humans, she explains. “If we want to understand what’s common across humans and animals, we need to have more of this kind of data.”

A vocabulary test for babies, adapted to dogs

Among animals, family pups are unique for how much exposure they get to human language. “You can probe a lot of interesting questions about language experience with dogs, because they’re some of the only animals that live in our houses and pay attention to us,” says Amritha Mallikarjun, a neuroscientist researching canine cognition at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the new research. 

The study scientists set out to test if dogs grasp the relationship between words and their corresponding objects. “We were interested in whether dogs understand words the way humans do,” says Lilla Magyari, co-lead author and a cognitive neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Stavanger in Norway. Some standout dogs are able to demonstrate their vocabulary through behavioral tests, but not all dogs are as abiding, capable, or well-behaved. The scientists wanted to know if even dogs that don’t display exceptional abilities still have some language sense. 

People have internal references for what words mean, or the ability to “picture” an object inside their minds’ eye from memory. However, it’s unclear if any other animals share this capacity to imagine something that’s not there from an associated sound. To explore this question, Magyari and her colleagues adapted a cognitive test previously used in studies of infants. The assessment compares EEG readings from a subject told a word or phrase, and then either shown a corresponding object or an object that doesn’t match the description. 

In humans, even those too young to speak, an observable effect called the N400 appears on EEG read-outs when people encounter language and other stimuli. It’s a characteristic signal that peaks around 400 milliseconds after a stimulus is presented, and gets larger when objects or images and words don’t match up. The bigger the surprise, the bigger the signal. Many scientists interpret the effect as evidence of understanding and proof of an internal reference for a word’s definition, even in non-verbal subjects.  

In order to make the test canine friendly, Magyari and her co-researchers made some careful adjustments, controlling for the dogs’ comfort, potential variability in voice, and other movements or communication signals between dogs and owners that might influence results. 

“I think this study is beautiful,” Lau says–noting the thorough and well-considered design. “I think they really did everything you need to be doing in animal cognition work.” 

The dogs, all healthy companion animals, were recruited via social media and were selected based on an owner’s assessment that their pet understood at least three object words. After a period of acclimating to the lab, owners and dogs were separated by an electronic window that could quickly toggle between transparent and opaque. The scientists attached electrodes to the dogs’ heads at key points. Over multiple trials, the pets were played recordings of their owners’ voices calling their attention to one of five familiar objects (e.g. ‘Fido, look, the ball’), while being shown their owners’ faces through the window. Then, after a brief period of opaque blankness, the window would reveal the owner holding up one of the objects–either a match to the previously played phrase, or a mismatch. Meanwhile, the EEG recorded the electronic pulses going on inside their brains. 

Out of the 27 dogs that started the experiment, 18 were included in the final analyses. Nine were excluded, mostly because they wouldn’t sit still enough to yield clean EEG data. But even accounting for the challenges of wiggley animal subjects, the scientists still found clear patterns in their results. 

When there was a mismatch between the auditory stimulus and the object presented, the dogs’ EEG readouts routinely showed a significant signal peak between 200 and 600 milliseconds later–indicating that even average domestic canines can distinguish between the meanings of some words. The dogs had the largest brain response when the most well-known words were paired with mismatched objects, based on owner reports and further bolstering the findings. 

The timing of the pulse suggests it could be analogous to the human N400 signal, though follow-up research would be needed to verify this hypothesis, says Marianna Boros, co-lead study author and a cognitive neuroscientist and psychologist at ELTE University in Budapest, Hungary. Mallikarjun notes that “EEG is very finicky,” and it’s possible that the documented brain wave in the study is something unique, because human and dog brains are so different, she explains. Nonetheless, Boros is eager to continue probing the potential connection. “Our study is just the first in non-human animals, testing this mismatch effect. We have to conduct many more,” she says. “It’s pretty exciting to see that there might be some evolutionary continuity.”

Piecing together the building blocks of language

Because the experiment used objects familiar to the dogs involved, the study doesn’t show that canines can generalize a word to mean an entire category of object–another key aspect of human language, says Colin Phillips, a linguistics professor at the University of Oxford and the University of Maryland. He was also not entirely convinced that the time delay within the research proved dogs were referencing a mental image or memory. “They’ve associated sounds with specific objects,” Phillips says. “It’s impressive… it’s a carefully controlled study,” he adds–but ultimately not a very surprising one. “We kind of already know dogs can do this.”

Language is more complex than just noun recognition, and the study does not suggest that dogs are anywhere near as capable language learners as humans, say Boros and Magyari. Rather it hints at what abilities among mammals might have preceded humans’ extraordinarily complex linguistic system, they note. 

Mallikarjun agrees that studying our pets can provide insight into ourselves. Through research like this, we can better learn what is and isn’t unique to human cognition, and come to understand language development, she says. 

And at the same time, it’s also a good reminder that dogs and other animals are special in their own ways. “Communication has many different components,” says Lau. “Just because humans have a particular kind of unique communication system that’s not fully shared with any other animals, that doesn’t mean other animals don’t have very complex communicative abilities too.”

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Not all dolphins live in the salty ocean. While rare, some river dolphins live and eat in freshwater and are best known for their candy colored hues. Now, paleontologists have uncovered a fossilized skull belonging to a 16-million-year-old extinct river dolphin species in Peru named Pebanista yacuruna. It could grow to about 10 to 11 feet long and is the largest known species of river dolphin known to science. Pebanista is described in a study published March 20 in the journal Science Advances. 

The name Pebanista yacuruna is inspired by the Yacuruna, a mythical aquatic people that legends say inhabit underwater cities in the Amazon basin and are similar to the god Neptune in Greek mythology. The fossilized skull was found in the Peruvian Amazon and belongs to the group Platanistoidea. This group was a common animal in the Earth’s ocean between 24 and 16 million years ago. The team believes that their primarily salt water dwelling ancestors invaded the prey-rich freshwater ecosystems of the early Amazon and learned to adapt to this new environment.

“Sixteen million years ago, the Peruvian Amazonia looked very different from what it is today,” Aldo Benites-Palomino, a study co-author and paleontologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, said in a statement. “Much of the Amazonian plain was covered by a large system of lakes and swamps called Pebas.” 

[Related: Eavesdropping on pink river dolphins could help save them.]

This landscape stretched across present day Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil and included a variety of ecosystems in its lakes and swamps. About 10 million years ago, the Pebas system began to give way to the floodplain that Amazonia looks like today. Pebanista’s prey began to disappear as the landscape began to change, driving these giant dolphins to extinction. With Pebanista out of the picture, the relatives of today’s Amazon river dolphins called Inia had an opportunity to sneak in. 

While these pink dolphins may look similar to the extinct Pebanista, they are not directly related. Pebanista’s closest living relatives of this newly discovered species are actually found in South Asia.

“We discovered that its size is not the only remarkable aspect,” says Benites-Palomino. “With this fossil record unearthed in the Amazon, we expected to find close relatives of the living Amazon River dolphin–but instead the closest cousins of Pebanista are the South Asian river dolphins (genus Platanista).”

Both Pebanista and Platanista have highly developed facial crests that help them with echolocation. That is when they emit high-frequency sounds and listen to their echoes in order to “see” their prey through sounds. 

“For river dolphins, echolocation, or biosonar, is even more critical as the waters they inhabit are extremely muddy, which impedes their vision,” study co-author and University of Zurich paleontologist Gabriel Aguirre-Fernández said in a statement.

[Related: This dolphin ancestor looked like a cross between Flipper and Moby Dick.]

Pebanista’s elongated snout with many teeth suggests that it fed on fish the way other river dolphins do. Modern Amazon river dolphins called boto are considered critically endangered and their primary threats include habitat loss and degradation and getting entangled in fishing gear. 

The Amazon rainforest remains a very difficult place for paleontological fieldwork. Fossils like these are only accessible during the dry season, when water levels drop low enough to expose ancient layers of bedrock. If the fossils are not collected in time, they can be swept away during the rainy season. 

The specimen was found in 2018 in an expedition led by Peruvian paleontologist Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi, who completed his postdoctoral work at the University of Zurich. The team traveled more than 180 miles of the Napo River in northeastern Peru and collected dozens of other fossils. The dolphin skull is now housed at the Museo de Historia Natural in Lima.

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House finches, mourning doves, and maybe even the occasional cardinal are coming out of their winter hiding spots to sit amongst blooming Magnolia trees and maybe indulge in some spare crumbs on the street. Noticing nature isn’t just a good practice in mindfulness—it’s also a fun hobby. Birding can be done any time of year and all over the world. If you want to entice more birds into your backyard—and bully some squirrels while you’re at it—this smart bird feeder is 52 percent off on Amazon as part of its Big Spring Sale. The sale ends Sunday, so make sure to get yours before it migrates back to full price.

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This camera is easy to put together, clean, and refill, making it a great pick for aspiring ornithologists and experienced birders alike. The 1080p camera only records when a bird sets off its PIR motion sensor. Then, it saves the recording to an SD card or in the cloud. Built-in AI bird recognition identifies the winged friend that lands on the feeder, and an app lets you file through avian visitors past and present. If you’re tired of squirrels stealing your bird feed, you can tell them to buzz-off, literally. Finally, the squirrels can get what they deserve.

If you’re looking for the best bird feeder camera and you’re cool with buying something at full price, go for the Bird Buddy. It’s $239 for the base version, but we recommend upgrading to the $299 version with the solar roof. It’s pricey, but completely worth it for up-close and personal views of the birds in your neighborhood.

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It’s not easy being green, but a newly described amphibian ancestor is seeing limelight after decades safely tucked away in the Smithsonian’s National Fossil Collection in Washington DC. This new species is named Kermitops gratus, in honor of world-famous amphibian Kermit the Frog. It lived more than 270 million years ago and its discovery is altering the story of amphibian evolution. The findings are described in a study published March 21 in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. 

A stout salamander-like creature 

Based on an inch-long skull fossil, scientists believed that Kermitops likely would have resembled a stout salamander. The fossil has large, oval-shaped eye sockets, much like the distinct eyes on the Muppet it is named after. Kermitops was likely a temnospondyl–a member of a diverse group of early amphibian relatives that lived for more than 200 million years from the Carboniferous Period up to to the Triassic. 

“It probably was a little more terrestrial than some other frogs and salamanders,” study co-author and Smithsonian vertebrate paleontologist Arjan Mann tells PopSci. “The ecosystems that would have inhabited probably marginal pond environments, similar areas to where you find amphibians living today. 

At times, Kermitops’ environment was potentially similar to the swamp where viewers first meet Kermit singing and strumming the banjo in 1979’s The Muppet Movie. This prehistoric ecosystem also saw large shifts in seasonal rainfall and dry spells, similar to the monsoons seen today in the Southwestern United States and Southeast Asia.

[Related: These pleasantly plump salamanders dominated the Cretaceous period.]

“That rainfall would really feed this ecosystem in pulses,” study co-author and George Washington University evolutionary biologist and PhD student Calvin So tells PopSci. “That’s what sustained animals like Kermitops and modern amphibians have some of the same or similar constraints.”

Paleontological patience

The fossil was originally found by the late Smithsonian paleontologist Nicholas Hotton III. Hotton made several research trips to dig for fossils from a group of rock outcrops in north central Texas called the Red Beds. These rust-colored rocks date back to more than 270 million years ago to the Permian Period and are full of the fossilized remains of ancient reptiles, amphibians, and even some precursors to modern mammals called sail-backed synapsids.

Hotton’s team collected so many fossils that they couldn’t study them all in close detail. This included a small proto-amphibian skull that they found in a rock layer called Clear Fork Formation in 1984–the same year The Muppets Take Manhattan was released. The skull was labeled as an early amphibian and spent decades before researchers could take a closer look. It caught Mann’s eye in 2021 when he was a postdoctoral paleontologist at the Smithsonian. 

“It was easily identifiable as a taxa that that’s something new and different from anything we knew,” Mann tells PopSci. 

A head that snaps

Mann and So worked together to determine what kind of prehistoric creature the fossil belonged to. It has a mix of traits that appeared different from the skulls of older tetrapods–the ancient ancestors of amphibians and living four-legged vertebrates. The region of the skull behind the animal’s eyes was also much shorter than its longer and curved snout. These skull proportions likely helped it quickly grab food like a modern day snapping turtle.

“It may have been predisposed for these quick snapping motions,” says So. “Because of its small size, it was probably feeding on things smaller than itself, like insects, worms and vertebrates, but also potentially smaller amphibians.”

Since the skull had such unique features, the team concluded that it belonged to an entirely new genus they named Kermitops. It is a play on the amphibian’s wide-eyed face and is a mix of the words “Kermit” and the Greek suffix “-ops,” for face. The word Gratus represents the team’s gratitude to Hotton and the rest of the team that originally unearthed the fossil so many years ago. 

The team also hopes that naming it after the beloved frog who was created by puppeteer Jim Henson in 1955, can help get more people excited about the discoveries that scientists make using museum collections.

[Related: These legless, egg-laying amphibians secrete ‘milk’ from their butts.]

“There’s so many implications for reaching a broader audience,” says So. “We don’t only want to inspire future generations of paleontologists, but we hope to broaden what science is, from this very dedicated field to something that may potentially integrate with more creative and artistic things. “

In a statement sent to PopSci, Kermit the Frog wrote: “When the Smithsonian team approached me asking to name a newly-discovered amphibian species after me, I was truly honored… and a little puzzled. I don’t quite see the resemblance, but Miss Piggy and the other Muppets assured me it’s uncanny! Wait ‘til I tell my family in the swamp about our new great-great-great-great-great aunt or uncle–although we never got any gifts from them, so maybe they’re not that great.”

[Related: These spiky frog skulls look more like dinosaur fossils.]

Small fossil, big deal

Despite being such a tiny specimen, Kermitops is filling in some large evolutionary gaps for amphibians. The early fossil record of amphibians and their ancestors is very fragmented, which makes it difficult for scientists to put together how frogs, salamanders, axolotls, and their kin evolved. Finding more early forms of amphibious life is essential for building out the early branches of the amphibian family tree.

“Amphibian evolution was believed to be sort of a linear pattern before, but fossils like Kermitops, kind of put a wrench in that by showing maybe this wasn’t as simple as we thought,” says Mann. “It might have been a process that occurred over many lineages at the same time. Paleontology is always more than just dinosaurs, and there are lots of cool evolutionary stories and mysteries still waiting to be answered.”

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A distinct subpopulation of orca whales appears to be using specialized hunting techniques to hunt the marine mammals that they eat. Orca–or killer whales–are the ultimate apex predators, who have been observed attacking great white sharks, porpoises, and even blue whales. They are found in every ocean on the planet, and the specific environments that they live in have largely shaped their particular food preferences. The killer whales that forage near the deep submarine canyons off the California coast may use the sloping seascape to inform the ways that they catch food. These findings are described in a study published March 20 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Residents vs. transients

Groups of orca whales can form different populations or ecotypes. They have their own social structures, food preferences, and hunting techniques. Resident killer whales, like the three endangered pods that spend the summer and fall months in and around Puget Sound near Seattle, Washington exclusively eat salmon and have a more round dorsal fin.

[Related: Orca observed hunting and killing a great white shark by itself for the first time.]

The other type of killer whales called transient killer whales specialize in hunting marine mammals. Transients are typically slightly larger than resident orcas have a more pointed dorsal fin. 

The transients that forage in the Northern Pacific Ocean can also be further divided into two groups. The inner coast whales feed in shallow coastal waters, while outer coast whales hunt in deeper water. Most studies have focused on the orcas that hunt closer to shore and not much is known about the foraging techniques for the more offshore whales, such as those near the Monterey Submarine Canyon in California.

“Monterey Bay provides a conducive environment to investigate transient foraging ecology and behavior, due to it having a large deep submarine canyon system occurring close to shore that is accessible to researchers,” study co-author and University of British Columbia marine ecologist Josh McInnes tells PopSci. 

Two distinct foraging behaviors

McInnes and his team looked at the outer coast transient killer whales that foreage around the undersea Monterey Canyon, which is one of the deepest in the United States. They compiled and analyzed data from marine mammal surveys conducted between 2006 and 2018 and whale-watching ecotours between 2014 and 2021. The whales mainly ate California sea lions, gray whale calves, and northern elephant seals. 

The orcas were observed using two different foraging behaviors that appear to be unique to these more offshore transients. When foraging open water, the groups spread out and searched independently for marine mammals to eat. Each whale would also surface at a different time. 

However, if they were looking around the deep submarine canyons and shelf-breaks, groups of whales would search for prey following the contours of the canyon. The group would also surface at the same time. 

According to McInnes, both foraging behaviors appear to be unique to these whales from the other transient groups that hunt in shallow water. 

[Related: Raising male offspring comes at a high price for orca mothers.]

“Their ability to locate and follow the contours of the canyon was surprising based on our focal follow surveys,” says McInnes. “We hypothesize that transient killer whales hunting in submarine canyons may listen to water being upwelled along the continental slope or shelf-break.”

Ramming or punting sea lions

The orcas also deploy special techniques if their prey couldn’t be easily cornered in open water. They subdued their prey by ramming into them with their head or body–as some orca do to boats. The whales also used their powerful tails to hit or launch sea lions out of the water and into the air. 

McInnes and the team believes that these outer coast whales are a distinct subpopulation that has developed these hunting techniques in such a deep water habitat. It’s also possible that these foraging behaviors may be culturally transmitted from one generation to the next. The team was surprised by their affinity for along the slopes of the canyon and shelf-break and just how much time they spent foraging and feeding. 

“Transient killer whales in Monterey Bay, California spend 84 percent of daylight hours foraging (searching, pursuing, and feeding), which is a significant amount of time,” says McInnes. “Feeding appears to be related to the size of prey these whales tackle, with long hunts involving gray whale calves and California sea lions.”

McInness also said the team “really appreciate” any photographs or sightings of killer whales. Images of killer whales can be sent to oceaniceologyrg@gmail.com.

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During the lockdowns of the early pandemic, the canals of Venice went from a mucky green to translucent cerulean; motorboat traffic along the waterways had stopped and sediment settled out of the water. Global carbon emissions dropped a record amount, albeit only briefly. People reported animals re-claiming territory from humans in much-memed (and often fake) posts. Nature was–supposedly–healing. 

Except that it wasn’t, really. The effects of Covid-19 restrictions on peoples’ activity and wildlife were nuanced and varied, according to a study published March 18 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The “nature is healing” narrative was far too simplistic to capture the full breadth of what really unfolded between humans and animals in the pandemic’s early stage, says Cole Burton, co-lead study author and a conservation biologist at the University of British Columbia. “I can understand why we wanted to believe that,” he adds, “but there was no one-size-fits all response with animals.” 

[Related: Bronze Age village was ‘pretty cozy’—until Britain’s Pompeii]

Instead, Burton and his many collaborators uncovered finer-scale surprises and counterintuitive trends. The scientists took advantage of the rare, experimental opportunity offered by the pandemic and analyzed mammal activity data from 5,400 camera trap locations in 21 countries collected before and during lockdowns. Unexpected patterns emerged. 

Lockdowns didn’t mean less human activity or more animal sightings

They found, among other things, that lockdowns did not reduce human presence everywhere–especially not in the parks and other greenspaces documented by the camera traps. “We saw a lot of variation in what people were doing. In some areas, people were using them a lot more,” explains Burton. In Vancouver, where he lives, he notes that regional parks were open and many people found themselves with more free time and an eagerness for safer outdoor socialization. People were “trying to find solace in these parks,” he says–activity on trails went up. 

Previous research into pandemic impacts on wildlife has used broadscale measures of human activity, like regional lockdown protocols, to infer how peoples’ behavior changed–but the new research highlights the importance of concrete and specific monitoring data. 

Yet even in locations where human activity did decline, mammal activity did not uniformly increase. “What animals were doing in response to people was super variable, that surprised us a bit,” Burton says. Amid the variation, the researchers found trends. Larger carnivores were more sensitive to human presence, so where human activity was higher, the cameras captured fewer big meat-eating animals like wolves and wolverines. In more urbanized areas or places heavily frequented by people, some of these larger carnivores disappeared entirely. But conversely, large herbivores boosted their activity alongside humans. The former effect could potentially be causing the latter, says Burton: It’s possible that humans offer herbivores a protective shield from their predators, scaring off the carnivores that the prey animals would otherwise have to avoid. 

Another finding was that animals’ responses to changes in human activity were location- and time-specific. In wilder places, animals appeared warier of people and were more likely to retreat when human activity ticked up. In more developed landscapes, animals seemed more habituated to people, and often either didn’t shift their activity level with humans or became more active alongside people. Though the scientists can’t say for sure why this was the case, Burton says one potential hypothesis is that, in more developed areas, wildlife may be taking advantage of human resources by, say, scouring trash cans for food. But he also highlights a possible competing theory: Maybe, where humans and development are more prevalent, other species have to work harder to access resources, traveling farther and appearing more active on camera. The new research, he notes, highlights that far more work is needed to uncover the why behind their observations. “There’s probably lots of different underlying stories about each different area and species.” Until further analysis is done, those stories will remain obscured. 

 Covid’s lessons for conservation

Already the study is offering hints. In some instances, the camera trap data showed that higher human activity led animals to become more nocturnal, increasing their nighttime activity–bolstering previous research findings that co-existing among people shifts many mammals’ schedules. “We think this is an adaptation that allows animals to share spaces with humans, while minimizing negative encounters,” Burton says. 

In a way, it’s evidence of how animals and humans can, theoretically, achieve harmony. Other species are “working hard to coexist with us, in ways that aren’t always obvious,” he explains. Perhaps, if humans take that into account, and begin meeting other mammals in the middle, nature could truly begin healing. 

Burton hopes the global, yet specific findings will help inform and improve conservation efforts. “We might need to think about different types of management in different contexts,” he notes. Perhaps in more remote settings, park managers could use the new study to support permitting, strategic closures, or other efforts that minimize peoples’ presence. In more urban areas, conservation efforts could focus more on reducing nighttime light and noise pollution, to offer wildlife some nightly refuge. “There’s a lot of nuance,” Burton says. “We have to be humble about that as we’re trying to manage our own impact.”

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Though they’ve captivated the internet since late February, three eagle eggs in a nest in Southern California are unlikely to hatch. Parents Jakie and Shadow continue to take turns keeping the eggs warm, as snow dots their nest overlooking Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains. 

“At this point, from the date that the eggs were laid, it’s past the time that Jackie’s eggs have hatched in the past,” biologist and nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley executive director Sandy Steers tells PopSci. “It’s not past the time that any eagle eggs have hatched. So there’s still a small window, but it’s diminishing quickly.”

According to the US Fish & Wildlife Service, it typically takes eagle eggs about 35 days to hatch. The first egg was laid on January 25, so the earliest the hatching would have been on February 29 and all three eggs should have hatched by now. A three-egg clutch like this is rare for bald eagles and is a first for Jackie. Only about 50 percent of eagle eggs hatch.

[Related: Watch: Three bald eagles could hatch any day now.]

Weather, altitude, and biology

“It could be that the temperatures we had during the incubation period, and when they were laid, were not that good. It could be the amount of oxygen. We’re at a very high altitude, higher than most eagle’s nests, so we have low oxygen levels to begin with,” says Steers. “We also had those big storms. It could also be something biological that just was off when the eggs were created, or during the development process. We just don’t know.”

In previous years, Jackie has left the eggs alone sooner, but this year, Shadow fills in as needed. Jackie and Shadow have had one chick in 2019 and one in 2022, but lost two eggs last year. In the coming days and weeks, they will likely start to spend less time sitting on the eggs. Eventually, the eggs will either be buried into the nest under sticks and twigs or could be taken by a predator like a raven.

Connecting with thousands viewers

The viral livestream of the nest has consistently been clocking in over 20,000 viewers per day, as intense blizzards and fierce winds have spread across the valley. Many viewers have expressed sadness that the eggs will likely not hatch and worry what this means for the pair. According to Steers, this does not tell us much about their future and has given the public some important life lessons from nature.

[Related: Thriving baby California condor is a ray of hope for the unique species.]

“Jackie and Shadow take every day as it comes and they deal with what’s in front of them. I think watching nature and learning from nature as to, it’s okay to have reactions,” says Steers. 

As for the eagle pair, Steers says, “We don’t know that they’re feeling exactly what we’re feeling, but they change their behavior in very distinct ways, based on what’s going on. They’re resilient; they move on.”

The nest cameras will remain on 24/7, so viewers will be able to tune in to see what changes as spring settles into the valley. The nonprofit also keeps a blog with daily updates about the nest. 

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Ireland may not be home to any snakes, but the island’s actual natural past and present is still bustling with other wildlife. It’s currently home to 40 species of land and marine mammals, 12,000 species of insects, and more than 400 bird species. Fearsome wolves used to roam the forests of Ireland, before being hunted into extinction by 1786 These wolves were likely a primary predator of one of the larger players of Irish natural history–the extinct giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus), more commonly known as the Irish elk.

Clocking in at about 6.5 feet tall and weighing upwards of 1,500 pounds, the males boasted antlers over 12 feet wide. By comparison, modern elk have antlers that are about four feet across. These enormous Ice Age mammals were the largest deer in Europe.

While they are primarily associated with Ireland, they have been found from the current western edge of the continent east towards Russia’s Lake Baikal. A 17,000 year-old cave painting in southern France depicts a deer with enormous antlers that archaeologists believed could be Megaloceros. Additional specimens have also been uncovered in Asia and Northern Africa. Megaloceros was first uncovered in a bog in Ireland and scientifically described in the 1690s, but its fossils continue to be uncovered all over the island.

[Related: Why doesn’t Ireland have snakes?]

“Despite Ireland being a tiny place, we have a lot of modern deer and a lot of giant deer deposits,” Paolo Viscardi, Keeper of Natural History at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin tells PopSci. “The depositional environment is just perfect and the preservation of these animals is incredible. There’s just this massive constant stream of giant deer turning up here.”

Heavy heads

Despite most museums listing the animal as an elk, Megaloceros was a deer. Their antlers were made of strong bone. This sturdy bone is one reason why they are more well-preserved than animal horns that are made of keratin. This same material that makes human hair and fingernails, that withers away over time. Horns are also more permanent like the ones found on a bighorn sheep. 

The earliest fossils of Megaloceros date back about 400,000 years and the most recent fossil is roughly 8,000 years old. Some Megaloceros antler fossils have been found completely detached, while others have been uncovered still connected to the skull. 

“The anatomy is just really interesting because they’re so big,” said Viscardi. “I’ve handled quite a lot of them and when you pick them up, you realize just how much they weighed. It’s really incredible that an animal not only grew this, but then walked around with it every day, on its head, and managed to use it to fight with.”

Antlers in the rut

Like deer, they shed these antlers every year. Paleontologists believe that the males had extra thick skulls and sturdy neck vertebrae to carry these antlers. Reproduction was also the primary reason for these enormous appendages, since males used them to fight one another for mates the way modern deer and elk do. 

“It was signaling to other males that you’re not to be messed with, which really helps when it comes to that in the actual nitty gritty of the fighting,” says Viscardi.

[Related: How do deer grow antlers so quickly?]

Megaloceros was likely a very opportunistic eater, grazing on whatever plants were available. While it was primarily an herbivore, they may have dined on some animal parts, since this annual competition for mates took up enormous amounts of energy. 

“I would be more surprised than not if they didn’t eat bits of animal remains,” says Viscardi. “I suspect the males would have actually actively sought out bones and the leftovers from scavengers and carnivores to feed on. It’s something you see today with a lot of deer. They’ll nibble on bits of bone they find to get the nutrients and minerals out.”

While having such large antlers benefited the species as a whole for reproductive survival, it came at a high individual cost. According to Viscardi, some of the specimens that have been found with antlers intact likely died shortly after the rut because they just did not have enough food to keep going. The fossils of large groups of males have been found together in bogs and farmland throughout Europe, many of whom likely did not have a chance to get enough food before the winter set in. 

A drawn out extinction

Extreme cold also likely played a role in their extinction in parts of western Europe. Their first wave of extinction began about 12,000 years ago. The giant deer began to disappear from present day Ireland and most of Europe when the climate began to cool.

“Food becoming less available and reproduction rates going down is probably what drove the extinction in Ireland,” said Viscardi. “As it gets colder, the quality of the food availability goes down. 

[Related: Researchers retraced a woolly mammoth’s steps 17,000 years after it died.]

However, their extinction was not a one and done event. Some fossils uncovered in central Russia reveal that there was an enclave of giant deer alive as late as 8,000 years ago. This last population of giant deer may have gone extinct due to a water climate, unlike their counterparts in Western Europe who disappeared due to extreme cold and ice. In a warmer world, they would have had to navigate increasing forests with their huge antlers and there would have been less grassland available for them to feed on. 

In some parts of Europe, they may have faced pressure from humans, as Neolithic settlements were beginning to expand when they went extinct. Humans removing a lot of vegetation could have put them under continued stress, but it was still glaciers and extreme cold that most likely led to their extinction in Ireland. 

“I don’t think there’s any really good evidence that humans turned up on the scene in Ireland, and we’re hunting or anything like that,” said Viscardi. “It’s very much more about the climate getting less hospitable.”

The post Ireland was once home to deer with massive 12-foot antlers appeared first on Popular Science.

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A sperm whale calf nursing from its mother, a great blue heron gobbling up a fishy breakfast, and a pair of otters splashing in the water: The wildlife images from the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards showcase the tenderness, brutality, and beauty of the animal kingdom.

This week, the World Photography Organisation announced the year’s category winners of the Sony World Photography Awards, honoring photographers across 10 categories. Ian Ford of the United Kingdom took home the top spot in the Wildlife category for his breathtaking image of a jaguar taking a bite out of a caiman crocodile on the banks of the São Lourenço river in South America.

[Related: Nature wasn’t healing: What really happened with wildlife during pandemic lockdowns]

The overall winner will be announced on April 18. More than 395,000 images from around the world were submitted for this year’s competition.

The post 12 wildlife photos showing the metal, serene, and cheeky side of nature appeared first on Popular Science.

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The world needs a better source of sustainable meat. Many conventional livestock raising systems are considered unsustainable and generally make the environment worse, so scientists are searching for new ways to feed and satisfy a growing human population. One source could come from one of the most feared animals on Earth. Farmed pythons could offer a low-emission source of protein, according to a study published March 14 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

Pythons are not venomous, but they do reach lengths of 20 feet. That girth comes with a lot of white meat that is high in protein and they are considered a delicacy in some Southeast Asian countries. Venomous snakes have historically been farmed for their venom, but the practice of keeping large quantities of snakes for meat has begun to grow. The farmed snakes are typically set up in large barns surrounded by “sun traps” that help snakes bask in the sun.

These snake farms could offer a solution, particularly in regions where python farming has already begun to expand in recent decades. While the farming still faces some issues scaling up, it is something to consider according to the team from this new study. 

“Climate change, disease and diminishing natural resources are all ramping up pressure on conventional livestock and plant crops, with dire effects on many people in low-income countries already suffering acute protein deficiency,” Daniel Natusch, a study co-author and herpetologist at Macquarie University in Australia, said in a statement.

[Related: Scientists swear their lab-grown ‘beef rice’ tastes ‘pleasant.’ ]

In this study, a team of scientists from Vietnam, Australia, England, and South Africa, looked at more than 4,600 pythons on two commercial python farms in Thailand and Vietnam. They compared two species–the reticulated python (Malayopython reticulatus) and Burmese python (Python bivittatus) and tested the effects of different food regimes. 

They were fed a mixture of locally sourced food, including pork byproducts, fish pellets, and rodents. Baby pythons were also ‘sausages’ made of waste protein from meat and fish offcuts. These sausages led to faster growth, without any apparent impacts on health.

“It’s a bit like hiding broccoli in the meatballs to get your kids to eat their veggies,” Natusch said.

“We showed that snake farms can effectively convert a lot of agricultural waste into protein, while producing relatively little waste of their own.”

They gained upwards of 1.6 ounces per day and the female snakes grew quicker than the males. According to the team, they were never force-fed and they also found that the snakes could fast without losing body mass. This means that it required less human labor for feeding than traditional livestock farming. 

Since they grew so quickly on smaller amounts of food, they had a good feed conversion ratio. In farming, feed conversion is the amount of animal feed that is needed to produce one pound of meat. 

“In terms of food and protein conversion ratios, pythons outperform all mainstream agricultural species studied to date,” said Natusch. “We found pythons grew rapidly to reach ‘slaughter weight’ within their first year after hatching. While large-scale python farming is well established in Asia, it has received little attention from mainstream agricultural scientists.”

Pound for pound, reptiles like snakes also generate fewer greenhouse gasses than mammals do. They have sturdy digestive systems capable of breaking down bones and produce almost no water waste and poop less than mammals.

“Snakes require minimal water and can even live off the dew that settles on their scales in the morning,” said Natusch. “They need very little food and will eat rodents and other pests attacking food crops.”

[Related: Snakes can actually hear really well.]

While there is also some concern from conservationists about commercial snake farming learning to the illegal harvesting of endangered and wild snake populations, Natusch has argued that the opposite is true. It may give local communities a financial incentive. 

“We also found some farms outsource baby pythons to local villagers, often retired people who make extra income by feeding them on local rodents and scraps, then selling them back to the farm in a year,” said Natusch.

Burmese pythons are considered an invasive species in Florida’s Everglades, where they are hunted to cull the population. A 2023 study from the US Geological Survey said Florida’s python problem is one of the world’s most challenging invasive species management issues. Their meat reportedly tastes like chicken, the team acknowledges that encouraging more people to eat snakes in other parts of the world will take some time. 

“I think it will be a long time before you see Python burgers served up at your favorite local restaurant here [in Australia],” said Natusch.

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Best Overall		Onyx + Rose SEE SPOT CHILL CBD Dog Treats		SEE IT
Best for joints		PremiumCare Hemp Mobility Chews		SEE IT
Best for bedtime		Well Loved Calming Dog Treats		SEE IT

CBD dog treats may sound like something only a truly extra pet owner would do, but they have some undeniable benefits at a surprisingly affordable price. These treats can play a role in managing pain, anxiety, inflammation, arthritis, and other disorders. And they come in delicious, pooch-approved flavors. Here is a guide to the best CBD dog treats that can help your pet.

• Best overall: Onyx + Rose SEE SPOT CHILL CBD Dog Treats
• Best for joints: PremiumCare Hemp Mobility Chews 
• Best for bedtime: Well Loved Calming Dog Treats
• Best for large dogs: Hemp Calming Chews
• Best for anxiety: Honest Paws Calm Soft Chews
• Best for smaller breeds: HempMy Pet Hemp Dog Treats

How we selected the best CBD dog treats

When it comes to our pup’s health, we approve of only the best products to protect them and keep them in good health. As an avid dog lover and owner, I used my own stringent criteria to determine whether these treats made the cut. Any formulated with less-than-stellar ingredients were cut from my list. In their place, I chose CBD-infused dog treats with ingredients like chamomile, melatonin, vitamins, and L-Theanine, which only further boost the positive impacts of CBD. I compared over 50 products to arrive at these final picks, which were only the highest-quality selections.

The best CBD dog treats: Reviews & Recommendations

Best overall: Onyx + Rose SEE SPOT CHILL CBD Dog Treats

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Why it made the cut: Broad spectrum CBD, CBG, CBN, and CBC means your pooch will reach ultimate chill.

Specs:

Pros

• Grown organically
• 30-day return policy
• Gluten-free
• Offers a subscription discount

Cons

• Pricer

Veterinarian-formulated, these CBD dog treats are made from natural, organic ingredients and are a good source of protein, fiber, and amino acids. There’s a 30-day return window if you’re pooch is picky—but the peanut butter flavoring should make it hard for them to resist. You can order them on a subscription basis so you will never forget to re-up. And, Onyx+Rose includes its lab certificates online so you know you’re getting the real CBDeal.

his HolistaPup pick are formulated with only organic and vegan ingredients, so you can be sure you’re feeding your pup only the best.

Best for joints: PremiumCare Hemp Mobility Chews 

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Why it made the cut: This pick offers all the calming power of regular CBD treats, along with glucosamine to support joints—making it perfect for older dogs.

Specs:

• Ingredients: Vitamins, glucosamine, MSM, collagen, minerals, and essential enzymes
• Quantity: 120
• Flavor: Duck

Pros

• No artificial preservatives
• Soothes joint stiffness
• Great value

Cons

• Some pups don’t like the flavor

These PremiumCare CBD dog treats have a stellar list of anti-inflammatory ingredients including turmeric root powder, flax seed, and vitamin C. These CBD dog treats for joint pain are formulated to boost joint health and help repair cartilage. Whether you’re looking to get ahead of any health problems with the best CBD treats for arthritis or want to soothe joint pain in your older pup, this signature formula has been reported to help with pain, mobility, and even arthritis. Plus, with their delicious duck and chicken flavors, your dog will think it’s treat time!

Best for bedtime: Well Loved Calming Dog Treats

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Why it made the cut: While many of our picks have soothing CBD, this option from Well Loved offers additional sleep-aid—making it the perfect nighttime treat for any pup.

Specs:

• Ingredients: Hemp seed, melatonin, ginger, chamomile, trytpophan
• Quantity: 90
• Flavor: None/natural

Pros

• No dairy or sugar
• Aids with sleep
• Soothes anxiety

Cons

• Crunchy consistency may be too hard for some dogs

Many dogs suffer from anxiety—whether it be prior to a visit to the vet or when you leave home for a long day at the office. If you’re looking for a natural and safe way to calm your pup, these holistic treats can last for up to 12 hours. And with the addition of ingredients like melatonin and chamomile, these Well Loved treats can help lull your dog to sleep without any hyperactivity or stress. These treats are grain-free and formulated without dairy, sugar, and artificial flavors so you can be sure your dog is naturally relaxed.

Best for large dogs: Hemp Calming Chews

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Why it made the cut: While the amount of treats you give your pup depends on their size, if you want to serve a larger dog without crushing your supply quickly, these powerful treats will do the job.

• Ingredients: Valerian Root, L-Tryptophan, Chamomile, Hemp Oil
• Quantity: 180 pieces
• Flavors: Duck

Pros

• Gentle effect
• Pup-approved flavors
• Formulated with natural ingredients

Cons

• Contains yucca

With 520 mg of hemp oil per two treats, you can adequately dose a larger dog throughout the day with less treats. Pups 75 pounds or more will only need six treats spread out through the day to feel the full impact of this pick. Reduce barking, hyperactivity, separation anxiety, aggression, stress, and anxiety with these treats, which have quality ingredients like valerian root, L-Tryptophan, chamomile, and hemp oil. And with no grain, gluten, soy, corn, or sugar, you can be sure your dog won’t suffer from an upset stomach after indulging in a few of these treats.

Best for anxiety: Honest Paws Calm Soft Chews

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Why it made the cut: Designed with ingredients to reduce anxiety, stress, or nerves these treats can transform your pet.

Specs:

• Ingredients: Hemp oil, barley, oats, peanut butter
• Quantity: 30
• Flavor: Peanut butter

Pros

• All organic ingredients
• Soft texture for any dog
• Soothes nerves

Cons

• More expensive

Honest Paw’s Calm Soft Chews are ideal to help manage your dog’s stress levels and promote long-term calm and relaxation for a healthier and happier life. These CBD dog treats for anxiety contain L-theanine and tryptophan, the same amino acid found in turkey that lulls you to sleep after a Thanksgiving feast. Since these dog calming treats are poultry-flavored, it won’t take much to get your dog to agree to chew on one. And with 30 chews per bag, your pup can achieve a month’s worth of zen days at a time. Unlike some competitors, Honest Paws uses only full-spectrum hemp oil, which has been tested by a third party for potency and purity. If you want to ensure your dog is getting only the best kind of treats and ingredients, this high-quality pick is a great choice.

Best for smaller breeds: HempMy Pet Hemp Dog Treats

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Why it made the cut: These treats are the perfect quantity for dogs that are new to CBD, or for smaller pups who don’t need as potent of a treat.

Specs:

• Ingredients: Pumpkin, Garbanzo Bean Flour, Rice Flour, Apples, Eggs, Unrefined Coconut Oil Infused, Mint, Parsley,
• Quantity: 25
• Flavor: Pumpkin

Pros

• Gluten-free, GMO-free
• Organic ingredients
• Can help with arthritis pain

Cons

• May require longer testing for results

HempMy Pet’s U.S.-made dog treats are made with human-grade, organic ingredients that are also GMO-free, gluten-free, and cruelty-free. The pumpkin flavor smells great, has a crunchy texture, and will have your dog wagging his tail for more. If you’re hesitant to give your pet a large dose of CBD, this pick is a great introductory product to give them a taste. It’s also great for small dogs who only need a small amount of CBD per day. Plus, the company cares deeply about animals: they are known for contributing to animal rescues and sanctuaries. One downside is that this is one of the smallest packs, with only 25 treats per bag—which means you’ll have to restock more often than you did with the bulk option. And if you’re looking to incentivize your pup further, consider the best dog training treats.

What to consider when shopping for CBD dog treats

There are so many options on the market today for CBD treats and it’s important to make sure you do some due diligence to choose the right one for your pet. While CBD dog treats are generally safe, you should always check over a few key points before giving them to your four-legged friend. 

First, it’s vital to understand that CBD is a naturally occurring compound that comes from hemp and marijuana plants. These plants are very similar, except that hemp plants contain less than 0.3-percent THC, whereas marijuana plants contain more. THC is a psychoactive compound—the one that some humans want for ourselves, but definitely not for our pets. Since we don’t want our dog ingesting THC, look for CBD derived from hemp plants instead of marijuana plants. Don’t be confused if you see dog CBD treats marketed as hemp treats—that’s the good stuff!

You’ll also want to take a look at the CBD concentration (measured in milligrams), quality of ingredients, transparency of plant-growing practices, flavor options, and the general reputation of the brand. Since that’s a lot of work to do, you can simply read on to find some favorite picks of the best CBD dog treats that you can buy for your pal today.

Medical conditions

Is your dog arthritic? Does your pooch have pain? Or is it more of a general nervousness issue that you’re hoping to help solve? Different problem areas should be treated with unique formulas, and this is no exception with dog CBD treats. Some of the best companies understand this desire to hone in on a certain issue, and as such offer different varieties to make sure your pup is getting targeted care.

Portion size

If it’s your first time dealing with CBD for dogs, it’s only natural that you’d want to start off slow. Like most things our dogs ingest, the amounts will vary based on their size and weight. Larger dogs will benefit from a greater amount of CBD, while smaller dogs will do just as well with a lesser amount. 

You’ll always want to check the instructions for recommendations on how many treats you should give to your dog. This is often based on weight (for example, a product may say to give one treat for every 10 pounds). That said, it’s a great idea to take it easy in the introduction phase by giving your pup around 2 milligrams at the most. Try this out for a few days to see the effect it has on your dog, and then you can start increasing per the product’s recommended dose.

Soft or hard chews

Sometimes the crunch factor just won’t do it for your pooch. Particularly if your dog has sensitive teeth and gums, or is simply getting a bit older and prefers something softer, you’ll be better off with soft dog chews. Your dog will thank you as he nibbles his woes away and channels a calmer self.

FAQs

The final word on the best CBD dog treats

• Best overall: Onyx + Rose SEE SPOT CHILL CBD Dog Treats
• Best for joints: PremiumCare Hemp Mobility Chews 
• Best for bedtime: Well Loved Calming Dog Treats
• Best for large dogs: Hemp Calming Chews
• Best for anxiety: Honest Paws Calm Soft Chews
• Best for smaller breeds: HempMy Pet Hemp Dog Treats

The CBD market has had widespread success for many reasons. Now, your pups can benefit from the plant extract as well. The best CBD dog treats can reduce your dog’s anxiety, manage pain, decrease inflammation, and improve overall health levels. Since they taste great, your pooch will be thrilled to eat one at any chance they get.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best CBD dog treats of 2024 appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

Legend has it that, back in the fifth century, St. Patrick exterminated Ireland’s snakes by driving them into the sea. He would appear to have done a thorough job because Ireland is free of native snakes to this day.

Except, Ireland never actually had snakes. So, if snakes can be found almost everywhere else the world—from Australia to the Arctic Circle—what makes Ireland so special?

For one, it’s an island. The Irish Sea is 50-plus miles wide. That would be a long swim for a land animal. A sea snake might have an easier time of it, but sea snakes live in warm tropical waters, not the frigid Atlantic.

[Related: A guide to all the places with no snakes]

But, you may be thinking, the U.K. has snakes, and it’s an island. That’s true. But for a long time, neither Britain nor Ireland was home to snakes. The Ice Age made the islands inhospitable to reptiles, whose cold-blooded bodies need heat from the surroundings to function. The glaciers retreated around 10,000 years ago, exposing a land bridge between Europe and Britain, and another between Britain and Ireland, allowing easy passage to the islands. Melting glaciers drowned Ireland’s land bridge 8,500 years ago, whereas Britain’s persisted for another 2,000 years. So animals from Europe simply had more time to colonize the U.K., and even then only three snake species managed to establish themselves in Britain. None of the three appears to have felt compelled to keep moving west toward Ireland; there’s no evidence for the slithering reptiles in Ireland’s fossil record.

Other islands that don’t have snakes include New Zealand, Hawaii, Greenland, Iceland, and Antarctica. Still, the absence of snakes does seem somewhat miraculous, given the global pet trade and the serpents’ potential to become invasive.

In Guam, the invasive brown tree snake has become so pervasive, decimating the island’s native bird and lizard populations, that local authorities have resorted to desperate measures to try to eradicate the slithering fiends. In December 2013, for the fourth time, the USDA dumped dead mice from helicopters onto Guam. The mice were laced with a high enough dose of acetaminophen (the main ingredient in Tylenol) to kill a snake that eats one within 24 hours. The airdrops have been successful, but they cull the snake population only temporarily. In 2018, the U.S. Department of the Interior committed $2.8 million to combat the the invasive snake in Guam.

It’s plausible that Ireland could one day find itself in a similar situation. Though the brown tree snake was accidentally brought to Guam, new snake species are being introduced to Ireland on purpose. Pet snakes are not banned in Ireland, as they are in Hawaii, New Zealand, and Iceland.

Pet snakes became a status symbol during Ireland’s economic boom in the late 1990s, but during the 2008 recession and afterward, tough times meant lots of people set their snakes loose. The snakes turned up in a lot of random places, but so far they haven’t seemed to spread far in the wild.

Let’s hope it stays that way. Because if Guam is any example, if snakes ever do take hold in Ireland, it would take a lot more than a wave of St. Patrick’s staff to get rid of them.

This story was originally published in 2015 and updated in 2024.

The post Why doesn’t Ireland have snakes? appeared first on Popular Science.

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Healthy reefs are known as  vibrant homes for colorful corals and fish.. As with any bustling ecosystem, they have their own sounds and can be quite noisy. The purrs, croaks, and grunts of fish and crustaceans that live there and the sounds of healthy coral growing can echo through the water. Larval animals may use some of this sound to help them determine where to put down roots or when it’s time to grow. Broadcasting these healthy coral reef sounds may encourage coral larvae to recolonize degraded or damaged coral reefs. The findings are detailed in a study published March 13 in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

One shot to settle down

As adults, corals are immobile. Their larval stage is their only chance to move around and find that perfect habitat. They swim or drift with the currents to  find the right conditions to settle down and then anchor themselves to the seabed. Earlier studies have shown that chemical and light cues can help influence that decision, but this new work looked at the role that sound may have. They likely can sense these vibrations, since corals don’t have traditional ears. 

[Related: Google is inviting citizen scientists to its underwater listening room.]

“What we’re showing is that you can actively induce coral settlement by playing sounds,” Nadège Aoki, a study co-author and a doctoral candidate at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), said in a statement. “You can go to a reef that is degraded in some way and add in the sounds of biological activity from a healthy reef, potentially helping this really important step in the coral life cycle.”

Reef soundscapes

To look closer, a team of researchers conducted experiments in the US Virgin Islands in June and July 2022. They collected larvae from a hardy coral species named Porites astreoides. It is more commonly known as mustard hill coral, due to its yellow color and lumpy shape. They distributed the larvae along three reefs along the southern coast of St. John. Of these reefs, Tektite is relatively healthy. Cocoloba and Salt Pond are more degraded, having fewer fish and less coral cover.  

The team installed an underwater speaker system at the Salt Pond reef and placed cups of larvae at distances of 3.2, 16.2, 32.8, and 98.4 feet from the speakers. For three nights, they then played healthy reef sounds at Salt Pond that were recorded at Tektite in 2013. They also set up similar installations at Tektite and Cocoloba, but did not play any of the recorded reef sounds.

After collecting the cups, they found that significantly more coral larvae had settled in the cups at Salt Pond than the other two reefs. The larvae settled there an average of 1.7 times higher in the enriched sound environments than in the ones that were not. The cups that were about 16 feet from the speakers saw the highest rate of larvae settlement, but even the cups that were almost 100 feet away had more larvae settling at the bottom than those where the sounds were not played.   

“The fact that settlement is consistently decreasing with distance from the speaker, when all else is kept constant, is particularly important because it shows that these changes are due to the added sound and not other factors,” study co-author and WHOI marine biologist Aran Mooney said in a statement. “This gives us a new tool in the toolbox for potentially rebuilding a reef.”

One thing that surprised the team was that there was not a large difference between the settlement rates at the more-degraded Cocoloba and the healthier Tektite reefs. A 2018 study found higher settlement rates at Tektite than Cocoloba, which may be due to natural variations. However, the Tektite reef has recently seen destructive hurricanes, a significant bleaching event, and even an outbreak of coral disease.

“We seem to have lost some of the complexity of Tektite’s soundscape over the last decade,” Aoki said. “It could be that conditions there are not as good as we thought they were, but we don’t know for sure.”

A potentially new reef restoration tool

According to the authors, a potential drop in settlement rates at Tektite shows just how severe the threats coral reefs are facing are and they need rapid, scalable solutions. Coral reefs protect the coast from storm waves and erosion, provide tourism and food opportunities for millions of people, and support at least 25 percent of all marine life. By some estimates, the planet has lost half of its coral reefs in the past 30 years. 

[Related: Sandy ‘Reef Stars’ help bring life back to coral reefs hurt by dynamite fishing.]

The team hopes that this work can help inform future coral restoration efforts. Using enhanced soundscapes may be used to increase settlement rates in coral nurseries or be passively broadcast at reefs in the wild. They would still need to be monitored by humans, but would be a relatively easy restoration prowess to implement. 

“Replicating an acoustic environment is actually quite easy compared to replicating the reef chemical and microbial cues which also play a role in where corals choose to settle,” study co-author and WHOI microbial ecologist Amy Apprill said in a statement. “It appears to be one of the most scalable tools that can be applied to rebuild reefs, so we’re really excited about that potential.”

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The Hudson River used to be among some of the most contaminated rivers in the United States. Following decades of environmental legislation and activism, wildlife including bald eagles, bears, and whales are being spotted in New York in larger numbers. The Hudson is also an important habitat for migratory American eels, who are now getting some help from citizen scientists. 

For the first time, this citizen science data will be treated as official data entered in the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s (ASMFC) peer-reviewed eel stock assessment report. Since 2008, the Hudson River Eel Project has relied on close to 1,000 citizen scientists donating their time every spring to net, count, and release about two million juvenile American eels. 

“What I love about the eel project is it takes another step deeper toward volunteers actually becoming scientists and thinking about research methods and the research questions we’re trying to answer,” Chris Bowser, project leader and Cornell University environmental scientist and educator, said in a statement.

[Related: How eels might hitch a ride to Europe.]

The project has several monitoring sites between Troy south towards New York City. Volunteers count and track the juveniles who are often called glass eels, since they are transparent at this stage of life. Their data helps inform conservation management decisions, since the species is an essential part of the food web. 

An eel’s life

American eels hatch about 3,700-miles miles southeast of the Hudson in the salty Sargasso Sea. When they are larvae, the eels are shaped like willow leaves and they migrate north towards the freshwaters of the Caribbean islands, South America, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic coast from Florida to Canada. 

To get to New York, the eel larvae catch a ride on the Gulf Stream current. They transform into their translucent 2-inch long glass eel state when they hit the brackish waters of coastal estuaries. They migrate into the 150-mile Hudson River tidal estuary every year from February through May. Glass eels then serve an important form of prey for larger organisms. 

When they move into freshwater streams and creeks, they develop pigment and turn into miniature adults called elvers. The elvers become sexually immature yellow eels in their next adult phase, turning a brown, dark green, gray, or mustard yellow color. These older eels become apex predators that help balance the ecosystem by eating fish, aquatic insects, and crustaceans.

They may remain yellow eels for five to 30 years before they reach sexual maturity and turn into silver eels. The sexually mature silver eels then head back down to the Sargasso Sea to spawn and likely die.

Citizen scientists stepping in

Tributaries and estuaries can create a bottleneck for the swimming juveniles, which provides those studying them an opportunity to catch, count, and release the eels to get an idea of population trends that can inform larger scientific studies. 

“When done right, citizen science can be very helpful because it can greatly expand an agency’s or a biologist’s geographic spread, and also a time series [spread over time] with tens of thousands of volunteer hours over the years,” said Bowser. “We have tried to collect data that is as robust as what’s been done at the agency level.”

[Related: How to become a citizen scientist—and when to leave it to the professionals.]

ASMFC accepted the most recent data in August 2023, partially due to the eel project’s strong data quality-control procedures. Partners from Cornell University and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation developed these standards to make sure that their protocols were easy to follow, standardize, and could be repeated every year. According to Bowser, the citizen scientists are all well trained and their eel count numbers and procedures are checked. 

Eels have been found in every waterway that connects with the Hudson River, including urban rivers such as the Saw Mill River in Yonkers, the Fall Kill Creek in Poughkeepsie, and the Poesten Kill creek further north in Troy. They also swim in rural areas, including the Hannacroix Creek in New Baltimore and Black Creek in Esopus.

“The widespread geographic diversity of eels means that you also have widespread diversity of volunteers,” said Bowser. “Different ages, different socioeconomic backgrounds, different experiences.”

Monitoring at the Fall Kill Creek site in Poughkeepsie for this migration season began in late February. There, local high school students and their teachers wade into about two feet of water around nets and traps that are set up along the shoreline where the glass eels swim. Another group may be counting and weighing the eels, while others gather air and water temperature data. 

‘Every single dam is a potential barrier’

Chemical pollutants, overfishing, climate change, habitat loss and human-man obstructions like dams have all taken their toll on the eels over the years. 

“Every single dam is a potential barrier for eels on their migration route,” Bowser said. 

To help combat this, the eels that the project counts are released past at least the first known barrier to their migration, whether it be a road, culvert, or dam.

If you are interested in participating in a citizen science project like the Hudson River Eel Project, visit citizenscience.gov to find something nearby.

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To the human eye, a video of a faux fox may look like a character from an animated movie. However, to an orphaned juvenile red fox–called a kit–the furry friend is the best imitation of its mother that the employees from the Richmond Wildlife Center in Virginia can provide.

The video posted to Facebook shows Richmond Wildlife Center Executive Director Melissa Stanley wearing a red fox mask to cover her face, along with rubber gloves. She is feeding the kit with a syringe. The kit is also sitting on a large stuffed animal fox that is meant to resemble her mother, while cuddling up with another, smaller stuffed animal. 

CREDIT: Melissa Stanley/Richmond Wildlife Center.

“It’s important to make sure that the orphans that are raised in captivity do not become imprinted upon or habituated to humans,” the wildlife center wrote in the post. “To prevent that, we minimize human sounds, create visual barriers, reduce handling, reduce multiple transfers amongst different facilities, and wear masks for the species. The mask helps ensure that she does not see human faces when feeding, which is important if and when she can be released into the wild.”

Imprinting occurs when a very young animal fixes its attention on the first object that it sees, hears, or feels shortly after birth. It then follows that object or animal around, usually a parent. Human handlers must prevent the injured, orphaned, or endangered baby animals in their care from getting too attached, if their mother or father is not present. 

[Related: How to help an injured bird.]

“The goal is to release animals back into the wild, not only to give them a greater chance of survival, but to recognize their own species and to reproduce to carry on their wildlife population,” Stanley told the Associated Press.

The kit was admitted to the center on February 29. A man walking his dog found the kit in an alley in Richmond. She was brought to the Richmond SPCA, since her rescuer initially believed that she was a kitten. The kit was less than one day old, weighed about 2.2 ounces, and her umbilical stump was still attached. Staff from the wildlife center initially tried to find the baby’s mother and den so that they could reunite the pair. However, they found the den site but were told by a grounds superintendent that the foxes had been trapped and removed. The wildlife center believes that the fox kit either fell out of an enclosure or from the back of a truck when the foxes were caught. Since then, staff have been taking turns feeding her every two to four hours while wearing the fox mask. 

Director of the International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council, Kai Williams, told The Washington Post that she hadn’t seen this technique for foxes, but that it is a common one for humans caring for birds. Avians rely more on their eyesight than mammals, who are dependent on smell. 

“Something you’d see much more is somebody dressing up in a whole crane suit or a brolga— something like that,” Williams said. “Sometimes they’ll just dress up in a covering that hides their shape a little bit, so they don’t quite look like a human, they look like a weird mass. Or they’ll use a hand puppet.”

The end goal is not to inhibit a healthy amount of natural fear of humans by ensuring that they do not associate humans with nurturing activities or feeding. 

[Related: Grizzlies are getting killed by roads, but the risks are bigger than roadkill.]

The Richmond Wildlife Center located three other red fox kits in rehabilitation settings throughout northern Virginia. They hope to eventually place the baby with these other red foxes and release the kits back into the wild together when they are healthy. 

According to the Humane Society of the United States, some signs that an animal may need help include shivering, an obvious injury like a broken limb, or if it has been seen crying or wandering. For birds, signs include missing feathers or if it looks like it has fallen to the ground. If you see an animal acting unusual or with any of these signs, contact local wildlife officials for additional help. 

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Please do not spend nearly a decade working to secretly clone endangered sheep in a bid to create giant Frankensheep hybrids for wealthy people to hunt for sport. It is very illegal, and the US government will make an example out of you.

Case in point: Arthur “Jack” Schubarth. The 80-year-old owner of a 215-acre “alternative livestock” ranch in Montana who the Justice Department reports pleaded guilty on Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes—conspiracy to violate, as well as “substantively violating” the Lacey Act, a law enacted in 1900 to combat illegal animal trafficking.

Located in Vaughn, Montana, Schubarth Ranch is what’s known as a shooting preserve or game ranch, where people pay exorbitant amounts to hunt captive, often exotic animals like mountain goats. Or, in this case, extremely large, never-before-seen hybrid supersheep derived from Central Asia’s Ovis ammon polii, or the Marco Polo argali.

With a shoulder height as tall as 49-inches and horns over five-feet wide, the 300-pound Marco Polo argali is unequivocally the world’s largest sheep species. They are also extremely protected, and fall under the jurisdictions of both the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and the US Endangered Species Act. On top of that, they’re prohibited from the state of Montana in an effort to protect native species against disease and hybridization. Despite all this, Schubarth and at least five associates thought it wise to try breeding new sheep hybrid species using Marco Polo argali DNA in the hopes of jacking up hunting rates.

[Related: How hunting deer became a battle cry in conservation.]

Pulling it off apparently required serious scientific and international scheming. According to Justice Department officials, Schubarth secretly purchased “parts” of Marco Polo argali sheep from Kyrgyzstan in 2013, then arranged transportation of the biological samples to the US. Once here, Schubarth then tasked a lab to create embryo clones from the Marco Polo argali genetic material. These embryos were then implanted in ewes of a different sheep species on his farm, which eventually produced a pure male Marco Polo argali Schubarth crowned the “Montana Mountain King,” aka MMK.

From there, “other unnamed co-conspirators” alongside Schubarth artificially inseminated other ewes (also apparently of sheep species illegal in Montana) using MMK semen. All the while, the sheep scandal grew to include forged vet inspection certificates claiming the legality of their livestock, as well as even the sale of MMK’s semen to breeders in other states. According to court documents, sheep containing 25-percent Montana Mountain King genetics fetched as much as $15,000 per head. A son of MMK, dubbed Montana Black Magic, helped produce sheep worth around $10,000 each.

The genetic thievery wasn’t limited to Marco Polo argali, either. Court filings also show Schubarth pursued similar endeavors to amass genetic material harvested from Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, which he then also sold through interstate deals.” All of this, perhaps unsurprisingly, also violated state laws prohibiting the sale of game animal parts and the use of game animals on alternative livestock ranches.

The crimes unfortunately go far beyond simple greed. These animal trafficking laws are not simply meant to protect conservation efforts—they’re in place to maintain the health of local ecosystems.

“In pursuit of this scheme, Schubarth violated international law and the Lacey Act, both of which protect the viability and health of native populations of animals,”  Todd Kim, Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD), said on Tuesday, with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks Chief of Enforcement Ron Howell adding, “The kind of crime we uncovered here could threaten the integrity of our wildlife species in Montana.”

It’s unclear how many hybrid sheep Schubarth and his colleagues successfully bred, as well as how many were ultimately sold and potentially hunted. PopSci has reached out to the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division for clarification.

In the meantime, Schubarth now faces upwards of five years in prison per felony count, a maximum $250,000 fine, and three years supervised release. He’s scheduled to be sentenced on July 11.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Heads up: Rachel and Jess are planning a livestream Q&A in the near future, as well as other fun bonus content! Follow Rachel on Patreon and Jess on Twitch to stay up to date. 

FACT: Dung beetles use the Milky Way to steer their poop balls 

By Christie Taylor

A dung beetle is a deceptively humble creature. Humble, in the sense that they literally eat and raise their young in poop. Deceptive in the sense that they perform incredible feats of strength, play an underappreciated ecological role, and can even (in some cases) appreciate our place in the cosmos.

Dung beetles are all members of the scarab family. And if the word “scarab” evokes ancient Egypt for you, there’s a reason. The scarab-headed god Khepri was, in fact, a dung beetle. Ancient Egyptians had seen these beetles rolling balls of dung, and connected them to the sacred, dung ball-like orb of the sun itself, as well as concepts of renewal and rebirth.

In any terrestrial ecosystem, a fresh pile of poop is an entire universe. Beetles eat dung, flies lay eggs, other insects come to eat the larvae of these animals. It’s a beautiful stinky circle of life.

It’s also dangerous and competitive, which is why one group of dung beetles has a strategy for success: get some poop, pack it into a ball, and roll it the hell out of there. These balls are sometimes 50 times their weight, and they’ll move them as far away as 200 meters before burying them underground.

First, though, they dance: the dung beetle hops atop their fresh-rolled ball of poop and performs one or more rotations before they then push their precious cargo to a safe hiding place. It likely plays a role in these beetles’ orientation to landmarks in the sky–which may be one way these beetles avoid rolling in circles and ending up right back where they started, in poop central. Signals like the rising or setting sun, the wind, and polarized moonlight are in the arsenal of dung beetles’ compass cues, without which they struggle to orient and travel in wobbly, circular paths.

And for at least one nocturnal species, the vital clue on a moonless night seems to be our own Milky Way. In 2013, a research team took some specimens of Scarabeus satyrus (and some poop) to a planetarium in Johannesberg, South Africa, and tested their navigational skills with and without a projection of our galaxy’s trademark diffuse band of light. Remarkably, the beetles steered straight–and floundered when fitted with tiny cardboard hats to block their eyes. 

Later research suggested these beetles are using the differences in brightness along the Milky Way, as opposed to individual star patterns, to find their way. And other research has found these nocturnal dung-haulers may be vulnerable to increasing light pollution, as bright lights provide confusing new landmarks, and diffuse light washes out the Milky Way’s vital contrasts.

Why does it matter if a beetle runs its poop in a straight line? Dung beetle success is crucial to healthily dispersing animal waste in ecosystems by bringing nutrients directly into the soil. There’s a citation-less figure floating around the internet that in some parts of Texas, dung beetles bury 80 percent of manure from cattle ranching–either way, these insects can absolutely demolish an individual cowpat.  And in so doing, they may help reduce methane and even CO2 emissions from livestock manure. 

And by burying and eating dung, they reduce the opportunities for flies and other pests to propagate–a lesson Australians learned the hard way when native dung beetles proved poorly adapted to assisting with the dung of colonists’ influx of cows and sheep. Thankfully for Australians, a government program to introduce and appreciate cow poop-eating beetles has been active since the 1960s.

FACT: Bananas might be the secret to better beer

By Laura Baisas 

Bananas might be the secret to a better beer. In 2022, a team of microbiologists in Belgium reported that they could improve contemporary beer’s flavor by genetically engineering a type of yeast. They focused on a gene for a banana-like flavor, “because it is one of the most important flavors present in beer, as well as in other alcoholic drinks.” The brewing of beer has a fascinating scientific, culinary, and sociological history, with women serving as brewmasters for centuries. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more! 

FACT: Made up animals can help us understand how language evolves online—and how resistant people are to censorship

By Rachel Feltman

In recent years, folks have started talking about a phenomenon often called “algospeak.” It’s where users of social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok come up with code words to help them avoid algorithms that suppress or outright ban certain topics of discussion. But this kind of linguistic innovation is far from new. In fact, researchers have been studying a similar tactic among Chinese internet users for more than a decade. 

The classic example of this phenomenon is discussion of an animal called the “grass mud horse.” Despite having millions of results on Google, the animal doesn’t exist. Its name is a sort of homophone you can only play with in a tonal language like Mandarin or Cantonese. By shifting tones, you turn cǎonímǎ—grass mud horse—into cào nǐ mā, which is a very profane insult. Talking about this made up animal (and an assortment of other imaginary species) allowed internet users to curse, discuss topics considered taboo by the algorithm, and criticize government officials and their policies without risking censorship. You can see a great visualization of how this kind of wordplay works here. 

In some cases this has led to seemingly random words being banned. For example, the name of the band Hoobastank became a stand-in for the censored word “tank,” and is now itself flagged! 

Chinese social media platform Weibo recently pledged to crack down on this kind of pun-based censorship evasion for good. But luckily they’ve got their work cut out for them, because people just keep upping their wordplay game. 

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The idea that most biologically male members of a species are physically larger than the females goes back to Charles Darwin’s 1871 book The Descent of Man. While this is typically true for some species including gorillas, buffalo, and elephants, it is not necessarily a one size fits all fact. 

A study published March 12 in the journal Nature Communications found that the males in most mammalian species are not bigger than the females. Monomorphism–or both sexes being roughly the same size–is very common and females can be larger in some cases. The authors suggest that biases in scientific literature from over more than a century and a focus on more charismatic species like primates and carnivores has likely led to this misconception.

A persistent narrative

For some mammals, physical differences in size do vary depending on competition for mates and the differences in how mothers and fathers invest time and energy in their offspring. Male lions and baboons typically engage in physical competition for mates and the males are larger than the females. It has been assumed that sexual dimorphism–where the sexes differ in size–is most common in animals. Additionally, the idea that males of a species are always larger, which is the case in lions, applies to most species has also stuck around for decades.

“That’s how Darwin laid out the scene,” study co-author and evolutionary biologist Kaia Tomback tells PopSci. “And it’s very Victorian Era thinking about gender roles.”

[Related: A new evolutionary theory could explain the mystery of shrinking animals.]

During the 1970’s, a mammalogist and conservation biologist named Katherine Ralls was among the first to take a real scientific look at this narrative and push back against this idea that most male mammals are larger. Ralls found evidence that most mammals do not have an extreme dimorphism. More typically, the female members of the species are the same size as the males. Larger females are surprisingly common in nature. According to Tombak, Ralls has also been commonly misquoted as supporting the larger male narrative.

“Science is always changing, so it’s possible that the story will change,” says Tombak, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University. “But [the idea] has been a misconception in the sense that it’s this scientific narrative with very weak evidence.”

From bats to lemurs to elephant seals

In this new study, Tombak and her colleagues went through available scientific literature and compared the male and female body masses of 429 animal species in the wild. In the majority of cases, they found that the males are not larger than the females. In many species, including lemurs, golden moles, horses, zebra, and tenrec, both sexes are the same size.

A male and female plains zebra interacting in Kenya. Males and females are the same size in this species. CREDIT: Severine B.S.W. Hex

Some species did show significantly larger males, including the northern elephant seal. This is what Tombak calls a “famously dimorphic” species, with male northern elephant seals weighing in at about three times larger than females.

On the other end of the spectrum is the peninsular tube-nosed bat. Females are about 40 percent larger than the males. 

“If you want to talk about most mammals, most mammals are rodents and bats, by far,” says Tombak. “Just almost half of bats have larger females. Some hypotheses suggest that for female [bats], it’s better to be bigger so that they can fly carrying fetuses and offspring more easily. Others have said that for males competing for mates, maybe agility matters more in fighting than size.”

A more complicated reproductive story

While the study did not sample all mammalian species, the team did identify trends that made sense given when a lot of these earlier studies were conducted. They believe that the reason for this persistent larger male narrative is related to more studies focusing on charismatic keystone species like primates and seals who have larger bodied males that compete with each other for mates. 

[Related: These female hummingbirds don flashy male feathers to avoid unwanted harassment.]

“As we read through the literature, there was just so much cool biology that we got into,” says Tombak. “I think what the study brings about is that there’s probably way more to reproductive strategies. A diversity of strategies is probably more common than just the males fighting physically for females.”

One example includes the topi, a type of antelope where females have been documented fighting each other for access to mates. Challenging this belief has met resistance and has been understudied, as it goes against the ideas of a seminal figure like Darwin.

“The story is really one of like the other side of the story of having been ignored for a long time,” says Tombak. “In terms of the science, I think it’s important because there’s just so much focus on the male perspective, male mating competition, and sexual selection theory.”

Tombak and her co-authors recommend more research on female biology across species to create a more realistic view of animal size and sex selection and are working on follow-up papers. The authors also caution that findings in this study could change, as more robust data on mammal body sizes is gathered in the future.

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Cicadas are known for emerging in the billions. These groups chatter so loudly that fiber optic cables can pick up the noise. However, the way that they pee is also making waves this year. Instead of urinating in tiny droplets that they flick from their butts like other insects and small organisms, cicadas pee in high speed jets more similar to large mammals. This unique urinary habit is detailed in a study published March 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). 

While the insects are a loud bunch, cicadas are not always so easily spotted among the trees. During a research trp in Peru, a team of scientists got lucky and found multiple cicadas peeing in the trees. From this encounter, the team was able to disprove two main beliefs about insect urination.

Droplets vs. jets

The insects that generally eat xylem sap from trees and pee in droplets since it uses less energy to excrete the sap. However, cicadas eat so much sap that individually flicking away each drop would be too taxing. Using this much energy to toss away pee droplets would mean that they needed to eat even more tree sap. 

“Peeing in jets allows cicadas to generate a large volume of liquid excretion,” study co-author and bioengineer/biophysicist Elio Challita tells PopSci. “This is critical because these insects must ingest a substantial amount of xylem-sap daily. So they need to excrete large volumes as well.” Challita completed his work on this study while working with Georgia Tech’s Bhamla Lab and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University. 

[Related: Watch these tiny bugs catapult urine with their butts.]

Saving energy

Smaller animals are also expected to urinate this way since their orifice is considered too small to release anything thicker than a droplet. Cicadas are on the larger size for insects and can have a wingspan close to that of some hummingbirds. For the cicadas, it appears aht urinating in jets uses less energy than tossing away the pee droplets. Scientists previously believed that if a small animal like an insect wants to eject jets of liquid, it is challenging for them since it would require energy to force the fluid out at a high speed and their bodies are not big enough. Larger animals can use gravity and inertia to help them urinate while saving energy. The team believes that the energy savings and the cicada’s larger size enable them to pee more like a big animal. 

“The biggest surprise was discovering that cicadas can pee in jets, despite being small insects with energetic constraints due to their nutrient-deficient diet,” says Challita. “This goes against the conventional wisdom that small animals, especially those under one kilogram [2.2. pounds], cannot pee in jets.”

‘Expect a lot of peeing’

Studying how the cicadas urinate offers new understanding of fluid dynamics in everything from insects up to large mammals including elephants. According to Challita and the team, studying all of the different ways that animals excrete liquid has potential applications in other areas including soft robotics, additive manufacturing, and drug delivery systems. Since cicadas are now the smallest known animals to create high-speed jets, they could inform how to make jets in small robots or nozzles. 

Beginning in April two broods of cicadas–one in the Midwestern United States and one in the South–will emerge simultaneously. There is a small overlap area in Illinois and these broods only emerge at the same time once every 221 years. Ahead of the “dual emergence” it’s not currently known what kind of impact their urination will have on the ecosystem. But it could be big. 

“Cicadas will be emerging in the billions this year, so expect a lot of peeing! More importantly, we don’t understand the ecological implications for the surrounding flora and fauna,” says Challita.”

[Related: Scientists finally discover the enzyme that makes pee yellow.]

The research also highlights why it’s important to study some of the more mundane and everyday aspects of animal biology. 

“By investigating these processes, we can uncover fascinating adaptations and gain insights into how animals interact with their environment,” says Challita. “It’s also a reminder that there’s still so much to discover about the natural world, even in the most unexpected places, like cicada pee!”

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To better understand the ocean’s overall health, researchers hope to harness some of evolution’s simplest creatures as tools to assess aquatic ecosystems. All they need is $20 worth of materials, a 3D-printer, and some jellyfish hats. 

Jellyfish first began bobbing through Earth’s ancient oceans at least half a billion years ago, making them some of the planet’s oldest creatures. In all that time, however, their biology has remained pretty consistent—a bell-shaped, brainless head attached to a mass of tentacles, all of which is composed of around 95 percent water. Unfortunately, that same steady state can’t be said of their habitat, thanks to humanity’s ongoing environmental impacts.

Although it’s notoriously dangerous, technologically challenging, and expensive for humans to reach the ocean’s deepest regions, jellyfish do it all the time. Knowing this, a team of Caltech researchers, led by aeronautics and mechanical engineering professor John Dabiri, first created a jellyfish-inspired robot to explore the abyss. While the bot’s natural source material is Earth’s most energy efficient swimmer, the mechanical imitation couldn’t quite match the real thing. Dabiri and colleagues soon realized another option: bringing the robotics to actual jellyfish.

“Since they don’t have a brain or the ability to sense pain, we’ve been able to collaborate with bioethicists to develop this biohybrid robotic application in a way that’s ethically principled,” Dabiri said in a recent profile.

First up was a pacemaker-like implant capable of controlling the animal’s speed. Given its efficiency, a jellyfish with the implant could swim three times as fast as normal while only requiring double the energy. After some additional tinkering, the team then designed a “forebody” that also harmlessly attaches to a jelly’s bell.

This 3D-printed, hat-like addition not only houses electronics and sensors, but makes its wearer even faster. Its sleek shape is “much like the pointed end of an arrow,” described Simon Anuszczyk, the Caltech graduate student and study lead author who came up with the forebody design. In a specially built, three-story vertical aquarium, the cyborg hat-sporting jellyfish could swim 4.5 times faster than its regular counterparts.

[Related: Even without brains, jellyfish learn from their mistakes.]

By controlling their jellies’ vertical ascent and descent, Dabiri’s team believes the biohybrids could one day help gather deep ocean data previously obtainable only by using extremely costly research vessels and equipment. Although handlers can only control the up-and-down movement of their cyborg animals at the moment, researchers believe additional work could make them fully steerable in any direction. They’ll also need to develop a sensor array capable of withstanding the deep sea’s crushing pressures, but the team is confident they are up to the challenge.

“It’s well known that the ocean is critical for determining our present and future climate on land, and yet, we still know surprisingly little about the ocean, especially away from the surface,” Dabiri said. “Our goal is to finally move that needle by taking an unconventional approach inspired by one of the few animals that already successfully explores the entire ocean.”

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The Pacific is the largest and deepest ocean basin on the planet. Scientists barely know just how many different organisms call these deep waters home. Many of these areas are remote and difficult to explore, but that hasn’t stopped efforts to find out what’s really lurking under the sea. In February, a team of researchers exploring the Bounty Trough off the coast of New Zealand discovered roughly 100 new and potentially new marine species. 

Team members from the nonprofit organization Ocean Census, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand (NIWA), and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa collected close to 1,800 samples during the three week long expedition. Some of the specimens were uncovered more than 15,000 feet deep. 

“It looks like we have a great haul of new, undiscovered species,” Ocean Census science director and expedition co-leader Alex Rogers said in a statement. “By the time all our specimens are examined, we will be north of 100 new species. But what’s really surprised me here is the fact this extends to animals like fish–we think we’ve got three new species of fish.”

The team also found dozens of new mollusks, a shrimp, and a cephalopod that is a type of predatory mollusk. According to Ocean Census, we currently know of 240,000 marine species and an average of 2,200 species are discovered annually. 

[Related: See the strange new species discovered near Chile—with the help of a deep-diving sea robot.]

One find has been particularly baffling to the experts working to identify the new species. Initially, the team believed it was a new sea anemone or a seastar, but taxonomists do not believe that it is either of those species. 

“We now think it could be a new species of octocoral, but also a new genus [wider grouping of species],” Queensland Museum Network taxonomist Michela Mitchell said in a statement. “Even more excitingly, it could be a whole new group outside of the octocoral. If it is, that is a significant find for the deep sea and gives us a much clearer picture of the planet’s unique biodiversity.”

[Related: Four new octopus species discovered in the deep-sea vents off Costa Rica.]

Expeditions to underexplored ocean regions like the Bounty Trough are critical to discovering new species. The Bounty Trough is a roughly 500-mile long basin east of the South Island of New Zealand. Previously, geologists have surveyed this very deep ocean basin, but this is a first for biologists. 

“We’ve gone to lots of different habitats and discovered a whole range of new species, from fish to snails, to corals, and sea cucumbers–really interesting species that are going to be new to science,” NIWA marine biologist Sadie Mills said in a statement. 

At the beginning of the February 2024 expedition, the team used an imagine system and video cameras to map the area. This was in an effort to make sure that their equipment and cameras could safely operate and not harm any vulnerable animal communities. To collect specimens, they used a sampling device called the Brenke sled. It uses two nets, with one close to the seafloor and the other about three feet above that other net. It drags along the floor, churning up the animals that live close to the sea floor. Baited nets were used to find some of the larger animals of the trough. 

The specimens will be stored at the NIWA Invertebrate Collection (NIC) and National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in their Mollusca and Fish Collections. The findings will also be included in future editions of the New Zealand Marine Biota NIWA Biodiversity Memoir. 

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April in the Florida Panhandle. It was hot, humid, and a thunderstorm was lurking. But as a fresh graduate student, I was relieved for the escape from my first brutal Minnesota winter. I was accompanying my adviser, Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido, on a project that would end up dominating my Ph.D. work. Out in the scrubland, my eyes darted at every movement, on the alert for an insect that likes shiny beads.

Laphria saffrana, also known as robber flies, are chunky black and yellow flies. Most of a laphria’s head is made up of its large eyes, between which sits a formidable proboscis–a long, tubular mouthpart that can deliver a potent venom capable of incapacitating prey in a heartbeat.

The photos Paloma showed me before we got there, though stunning, were of no help in looking for the fly. There were insects flying in every direction, their movements a blur, making it impossible to pick out any details. I only had a split second to figure out whether the thing I was seeing was a laphria, a similarly colored yellowjacket wasp, or something else entirely.

Despite their relatively crude vision, the flies I was looking for are far more adept than I am at picking out the insects they’re targeting. Somehow they’re able to zero in on their prey of choice: beetles. Based on her field observations the previous year, Paloma thought they did this by looking for the flash of beetle wings.

If she was right, laphria have hit upon an ingenious trick that balances the need for speed, accuracy and specificity. Here are some of the clues we’ve found to the secrets of their success.

Following the flash

Paloma had previously studied other predator insects such as dragonflies and killer flies. Their compound eyes don’t provide a lot of detail about the visual world, making it possible to trick them into chasing simple beads as if they were their prey insects.

But when Paloma tried the same sleight of hand on laphria, they wouldn’t go for the regular black beads. They chased only clear beads.

The one important difference between laphria and the other predators Paloma had studied is that they’re picky eaters. Their prey of choice are beetles. So, Paloma and our collaborator, Jennifer Talley, speculated that the reason laphria are attracted to shiny beads is because they reflected light and flashed like the clear wings of a beetle.

In Florida, we tested this idea by swapping out the plain black beads for a panel of LED lights that we could program to flash in sequence at a frequency that matched the wing beats of beetles, which can be anywhere from 80 to 120 beats per second.

In an outdoor enclosure, Paloma placed previously caught robber flies one after the other on a log. Outside, Jennifer and I controlled the LED panel in front of the log and the high-speed cameras that captured the action.

The LED pixels flashed in sequence, simulating a moving target. Laphria tracked the lights with keen interest only when they flashed at the same frequency at which beetles flapped their wings.

But even as our initial experiments began confirming the hypothesis, a new puzzle presented itself. How do the flies accurately track their prey?

Unique strategy to track and identify

Before they give chase, all visual predators, including laphria, need to accurately track their prey’s movements. Although many animals have this ability, what we found in laphria was, to our surprise, a slightly tweaked formula compared with other predators. Their strategy allows them not only to accurately track but also count those flashes from their prey’s wing movements.

When I looked at the high-speed videos of laphria tracking the flashing LEDs and actual beetles, I noticed that they primarily moved their head in short bursts, called saccades, interspersed with little or no other movements. These saccades are extremely quick, lasting less than 40 milliseconds, and the time between them is only slightly longer. To the naked eye, this looks like continuous motion, but our high-speed videos show otherwise. The degree to which the flies moved their heads during each burst depended on the speed of the target and how far off center it was from the direction of the fly’s gaze.

What our findings told us is that instead of continuously moving their heads to maintain the position of the target within the most sensitive parts of their eyes, laphria allow it to pass over their retina, moving only when it slips out of focus. We think this strategy helps them count the flashes of the prey’s beating wings, which determines their continued interest.

That is, the laphria know the wingbeat frequency of their most tasty prey and so pay attention to flashes that match. If the flash count matches their expectations, they will continue to track the target after it slips out of the sensitive zone of their eyes.

To bring it back into focus, though, they have to account for its speed and the position where they last saw it. Because the size of the saccade matches the speed of the prey, we think the laphria are keeping track of how fast the prey moves while at the same time counting the flashes from its wingbeats. So once a beetle slips out of focus, the predator knows how much to move its head to refocus.

Even though people track moving objects all the time–like while playing sports such as baseball or tennis or even just while watching a bird fly by–it’s a complex process. It involves dynamic cross-talk between the visual and muscular systems.

Regardless of the motivation, the goal while visually tracking a target is the same–to train the most sensitive zone of the eyes, known as the fovea, onto the item of interest. Laphria saffrana have seemingly tweaked that rule so they can learn more about the target. Their customized prediction strategy allows them to accurately locate and quickly chase down their very specific dietary needs.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In the summer of 2020, Jennifer Pytka spent three and a half hours a day sleuthing the internet for evidence of wildlife trafficking. She’d type กระเบนท้องน้ำ, a Thai word that loosely translates to stingray, into Google, and her search would immediately yield images of rings, each studded with an ornate white thorn about the size of a thumbnail. Pytka, a doctoral candidate at the Università di Padova in Italy, is investigating the previously undocumented trade of bowmouth guitarfish—a critically endangered ray whose spine and brows are adorned with these thorns. In Thailand, the horns are made into amulets, such as rings and bracelets, believed to have protective properties. In a 2023 study, Pytka notes how she pinpointed 977 of these items on online vending platforms, such as Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and the Alibaba-owned e-commerce site Lazada, over 21 days.

Bowmouth guitarfish amulets are just one example of the boundless number of protected wildlife products sold online, where a global Grand Bazaar of seedy vendors hawk their wildlife wares, and anyone with internet access can find products from rhino horns to exotic orchids to tiger claws with just a few clicks. With lax regulations, even weaker enforcement, and a lack of legal culpability, not only is wildlife trafficking able to fester online, but algorithms actually amplify sales, boosting the platforms’ profits.

Products sourced from protected species can be found across all manner of vending platforms, but with three billion active monthly users, Facebook is the grand pooh-bah. Pytka found 30 percent of the bowmouth guitarfish products on Facebook and 65 percent spread across other e‑commerce sites, such as Shopee and Lazada. “I’ve come to believe that Facebook is a driver of the global extinction crisis,” says Gretchen Peters, director of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online (ACCO), a nonprofit whistle-blower organization.

Prior to the emergence of the internet and online trading, vendors selling wildlife products had to connect with their customers largely through in-person networking, says David Roberts, a conservation scientist at the University of Kent in England who researches wildlife trafficking. But in the early 2000s, an increasing number of transactions in the physical world went digital, with wildlife trafficking being no exception. Today, nearly 6,000 species of plants and animals are traded illicitly, and the trafficking is worth up to US $23-billion annually. It is the fourth-largest illegal market, and many animals, such as rhinos, pangolins, and some species of parrots and sharks, are at risk of extinction due to their popularity on the black market.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) identifies at-risk species and designates protections and trade prohibitions. On-the-ground enforcement of CITES rules, however, is another matter.

Glenn Sant, a senior adviser on fisheries trade for TRAFFIC, a nonprofit aiming to reduce illegal trafficking, describes a hypothetical example of what might play out when someone catches a protected species of shark. “The fins will potentially be going to Hong Kong or China, and the meat might be going to Europe,” he says, adding that the skin might become leather and the oils sold for cosmetic products. Sant says that processing, shipping, and distribution around the world can make illicit animal harvesting nearly impossible to trace and therefore convict. That’s part of the reason Pytka chose to study bowmouth guitarfish—their unique thorns are easy to distinguish.

eBay was the first to acknowledge the growing problem of online trafficking and banned all ivory sales on its platform in 2009. Another milestone was reached in 2018 with the creation of the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online. This alliance, spearheaded by animal welfare groups TRAFFIC, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, advises technology platforms on how to identify and prevent wildlife trafficking. So far, 47 companies have joined the coalition, including Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—eBay, TikTok, and other international giants like Alibaba. The coalition’s most recent report, from 2021, found that between all the platforms, more than 11.6 million products made from prohibited wildlife have been removed or banned. A spokesperson from eBay said that over 350,000 listings for prohibited wildlife items were blocked or removed in 2022. Giavanna Grein, a wildlife specialist at WWF, encourages platforms to be more transparent with the public and concedes that the efforts undertaken by the coalition are just one small part of the picture. “We fully acknowledge this is a very complex and challenging issue, and there’s no one organization or effort that can tackle this,” she says.

Even with all the efforts, loopholes remain. Despite eBay’s ivory ban, for instance, a quick search by Roberts identified what he believes to be elephant ivory being sold under a code name. The product is still so readily available, in fact, that he centers his students’ projects on it. Similarly, a quick search on Facebook Marketplace for rhino horns for sale in southeast Asia immediately yields several posts.

Meta’s own policy prohibits “attempts to buy, sell, trade, donate, gift, or solicit endangered species or their parts,” and in a statement, a spokesperson said that content that violates their policies is removed. However, whistle-blower reports published since Facebook joined the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online have been scathing. “Facebook policy and public comments about countering illicit content are rendered virtually meaningless by the firm’s ineffective follow-up and enforcement,” reads a 2020 report from the ACCO. To assess the severity of wildlife trafficking on Facebook, the report used search terms such as “exotic + animal + for sale” in English, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Indonesian, turning up 473 Facebook pages and 281 groups openly selling wildlife products. Over half the pages were created since Facebook joined the coalition, showing that online trafficking appears to have increased.

In part, researchers were able to find so many illicit items because the Facebook algorithm is designed to recommend similar products and thus amplify the connections between vendors and prospective clients. (While looking at bowmouth guitarfish rings on Facebook Marketplace in Thailand, for instance, I saw posts for tiger claw amulets. After clicking to view them, my marketplace page automatically filled with curios made from guitarfish, tiger claw, and elephant ivory.) The ACCO report found 29 percent of the wildlife trafficking pages through Facebook’s “Related Pages” feature. Avaaz, a nonprofit that supports global activism, carried out a similar investigation and found that Facebook’s algorithm directed the researchers to dozens of wildlife groups, more than half of which contained potentially harmful wildlife trafficking content. Since it appears that Facebook’s algorithms are able to identify wildlife products, the algorithms should be able to hide these posts rather than promote them. When I asked about the discrepancy, Meta did not respond to this or any other question.

Peters says Meta is also passively profiting from the illegal activity. The platform makes money from embedded advertisements, and the online storefront Facebook Shops takes a small transaction fee from sales—including those of trafficked animals.

“[Facebook’s] platform is so big … and it’s in so many different languages that it’s really going to take a Herculean effort and a huge investment,” says Peters. “I don’t think Facebook is prepared to make the investments to clean up their own mess.” Peters also notes that Facebook could be more proactive in collaborating with law enforcement to dismantle criminal networks. “Facebook is sitting on a huge amount of information about some of the world’s biggest wildlife trafficking networks,” she says, and in many circumstances, the platform is not proactively showing that intelligence to law enforcement, claiming they’re protecting user privacy. Yet she says the firm is renowned for harvesting user data to sell to private companies. “It’s completely contradictory to me.” eBay is attempting to tackle this problem by implementing a regulatory portal that allows law enforcement authorities easy access to suspected criminal activity.

For the benefit of regular citizens looking to report posts on these platforms, I ask Roberts if taking down posts is akin to a game of whack-a-mole—with new posts cropping up as others are removed. “I don’t think we actually have the mallet to hit the mole,” replies Roberts.

In spite of the efforts of animal welfare and social justice groups like WWF and the ACCO, illicit wildlife sales are able to thrive online because platforms are protected from civil liability by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States. The act generally protects the platforms from being liable for the nefarious content they host.

“The way section 230 works is [that] any content created by a user like you or me or anybody else is considered free expression,” explains Peters. But she argues that illegal sales occurring over online platforms aren’t free speech—they’re felonies, and implementing something like a duty-of-care law would require platforms to remove criminal activity.

“I think [the platforms] should be held accountable,” says Roberts, who compares online trafficking to a bar allowing drugs to be sold in the bathrooms. The establishment is liable for allowing illicit activity on its premises. “How is that any different [from] a platform allowing illegal trade to take place?”

Both ACCO and Avaaz suggest simple measures for Facebook to reduce online wildlife crime. For example, when a user searches “bowmouth guitarfish amulets,” the algorithm could fail to return a search or trigger a pop-up explaining that the amulets come from a protected species. AI algorithms could also automatically flag questionable content or be used to trace trafficking activity. Pytka says it would be relatively simple to design such a system for bowmouth guitarfish rings because they’re so visually distinct. In early 2023, eBay acquired an AI-based software that will supposedly make the marketplace safer. In the meantime, though, my Facebook Marketplace home page swims with skeletal amulets, while researchers like Pytka can only speculate about how many of the endangered fish remain in the sea.

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

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It was a mosquito full of dinosaur blood and encased in amber that helped bring the fictional Jurassic Park to life. While real world bugs stuck in sticky substances don’t lead to dangerous dinosaur parks (yet), they do offer scientists a peek into their past shapes and behaviors. A pair of 38 million year-old termites trapped in tree resin in the middle of a mating behavior are helping scientists understand the mating behaviors of extinct insects. The finding is detailed in a study published March 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The two termites are an extinct species called Electrotermes affinis (E. affinis) and the discovery of this fossil was a bit lucky. Study co-author and entomologist from the Czech Academy of Sciences Aleš Buček saw the piece of amber in an online shop for fossil collectors.

“Termite fossils are very common, but this piece was unique because it contains a pair,” Buček said in a statement. “I have seen hundreds of fossils with termites enclosed, but never a pair,” 

[Related: A 50-million-year-old insect testicle is one lucky find.]

Buček purchased the fossil and a team from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology’s (OIST) Evolutionary Genomics Unit in Japan used an X-ray micro-CT to take a closer look at the bugs. 

“Identifying the species was actually not easy, because there were bubbles in front of important parts of the termite’s bodies,” study co-author and OIST postdoctoral researcher Simon Hellemans, said in a statement. 

The scan revealed what species they belonged to and also that the trapped termites were a female and male laying side by side. The female’s mouthparts were touching the tip of the male’s abdomen. This positioning was familiar to the researchers, as present day termites engage in a mating behavior called tandem running. The insects display coordinated movements to keep themselves together while exploring a new nest site. 

However, the fossilized pair’s irregular side-by-side positioning in the amber also stood out. A pair typically  would have been observed lying behind each other. The team believed that since the preservation in the amber is not an instantaneous process, the termite’s normal mating behaviors gets interrupted. Their positions then shift while they are being encased in the super sticky tree resin. To test out this hypothesis, they simulated the process in the lab. 

“Our approach focused on how fossils are created and how behavior changes during the insect’s death,” study co-author and Auburn University entomologist Nobuaki Mizumoto said in a statement. 

[Related: When insects got wings, evolution really took off.]

They looked at mating termite pairs and found that even if the leading individual got trapped on a sticky surface, the follower did not escape or abandon their partner. Instead, they walked around them and also got stuck in a position like the termites stuck in amber. 

“If a pair encounters a predator, they usually escape but I think on a sticky surface they do not realize the danger and get trapped,” said Mizumoto.  

According to the team, this new way of recreating the process of getting stuck in tree resin allowed them to analyze the behaviors of an extinct species with a new amount of precision.“For some things, fossils are simply the best evidence, a direct window to the past,” said Buček and Mizumoto.

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As ocean temperatures continue to soar, the world’s coral reefs all over the world are in danger from climate change, disease, and destructive human activities. In response, scientists are testing various ways to help, from intentionally bleaching them to preserve fragments to coloring their larvae to study reproduction, and transplanting coral fragments to regrow damaged reefs. 

According to a study published March 8 in the journal Current Biology, planting new coral in some degraded reefs can help it grow just as quickly as healthy reefs after only four years. The study was conducted at the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Programme in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, one of the biggest reef restoration projects in the world.

[Related: World’s largest known deep-sea coral reef is bigger than Vermont.]

“Large areas of reefs in South Sulawesi have been destroyed by destructive dynamite fishing 30 to 40 years ago,” Ines D. Lange, a study co-author and marine biologist at the University of Exeter, tells PopSci. “The degraded areas have not recovered since, as loose coral fragments rolling around on the ground crush any new coral larvae that try to settle.”

Dynamite or blast fishing is an illegal practice where explosives are thrown into the water to stun or kill fish. Coral reef species can pay a hefty price, as the blasts can loosen coral fragments and the indiscriminate killing of anything nearby disrupts the food web. 

The Mars program is working to restore degraded reefs by transplanting these coral fragments onto a network of interconnected structures called Reef Stars. These sand-coated steel frames that help keep them in place.

A team from the University of Exeter collaborated with the Research Center for Oceanography, National Research and Innovation Agency in Indonesia, Mars Sustainable Solutions, and Lancaster University to monitor reef carbonate budgets as the Reef Stars were planted. A reef carbonate budget is the net production or erosion of reef framework over time. They’re a key predictor of a reef’s ability to grow, keep up with rising sea levels, protect the coast from storms, and provide a key habitat for reef animals. 

After planting the Reef Stars, the team measured the carbonate budgets on the restored reef sites after a few months, one year, two years, and four years. These measurements gave them a sense of the rate that the reef’s functions were returning to normal. To compare, they also measured the carbonate budgets of degraded reefs and healthy control sites. 

[Related: Some Pacific coral reefs can keep pace with a warming ocean.]

In the years after coral transplantation, coral cover, colony size, and carbonate production tripled, according to the study. After four years, the restored sites were nearly indistinguishable from nearby healthy reefs. They were growing at the same speed as healthy reefs, while providing a similar habitat for marine life and protecting adjacent islands from coastal erosion and storm waves.

“We did not expect to see a full recovery of overall reef growth in such a short time, which was a very positive surprise,” says Lange.

However, the composition of the reef community on the restoration site in this study was different from what usually makes up a healthy coral community. This is because the transplanted coral fragments were a mix of different branching coral types. The community composition may affect how well the reef’s structure holds up for some larger marine species and the resilience to future heat waves, since branching corals are more sensitive to bleaching.

Longer-term study is necessary to see what happens to the restored reefs over time, but Lange says that this work is an example of how active management can help boost the reef’s resilience. The team is hopeful that the restored reefs will naturally recruit a more diverse mix of coral species over time. 

“We are currently investigating other ecosystem functions on the same restored reefs to get a bigger picture of the ability of reef restoration to bring back fully functioning reef ecosystems,” Lange says. “It would also be interesting to use the same methods as in this study on other reef restoration projects worldwide to assess the recovery in different environmental settings or across different restoration methods.”

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Alternatives to cow’s milk keep popping up. There’s oat milk, there’s goat’s milk, and now there’s amphibian milk (though you won’t find it on grocery store shelves). A team of Brazilian biologists have documented legless, subterranean amphibian mothers producing a milk-like liquid– packed with fats and carbohydrates–for their offspring. The research published March 7 in the journal Science is the first known instance of an egg-laying amphibian provisioning its babies with “milk.” The findings unveil new bodily functions and possible complex communication in an understudied animal weirdo. 

Non-dairy discovery

Generally, milk is associated with mammals. After all, the word ‘mammal’ comes from the Latin mamma for “breast,” a reference to our taxonomic classes’ milk-producing mammary glands. But mammals are not the only group of animals to feed their babies with specialized secretions. Pigeons, penguins, and flamingos have “crop milk”–a goopy substance made by bird parents of both sexes within the lining of their digestive tracts. Some spiders and cockroaches, too, produce milk for their many-legged young. Enter caecilians, wormlike relatives of frogs, toads, and salamanders that live primarily in tropical areas.

Ringed caecilians (Siphonops annulatus) are one of about 220 known caecilian species worldwide, and are the newest addition to the list of milk-able animals. The odd, nearly-blind organisms live secretive lives under the soil and leaf litter of South American forests and grasslands. “They are one of the least-well understood vertebrates, because access to these animals is very difficult,” says Carlos Jared, senior study author and an integrative biologist at the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil. But the effort is worth it, he adds because caecilians are a “surprise box,” constantly offering up unexpected biological treats.

Through years of careful study, collection, and observation in the wild and the lab, Jared and his colleagues have overcome the unknown to make some remarkable discoveries about S. annulatus. Most recently, they’ve learned that the amphibians provision their young with a viscous clear liquid “the consistency of honey,” says Jared. Ringed caecilians secrete this nutritious milk from their “vents”–the all-purpose opening at the rear-end of the body where waste and eggs are also released. In other words: these vertebrate worms feed their offspring with milk from their butts.

“It’s an exciting discovery of incredibly interesting reproductive modifications,” says Marvalee Wake, an integrative biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Wake was not involved in the new study but has studied caecilians extensively and penned a perspective article accompanying the research in Science. The finding “challenges existing understanding of the evolution of parental care,” she writes in that note. 

Dedicated parents

Some caecilians give live birth, but ringed caecilians lay eggs. Mothers guard their broods closely. Even after the young hatch and emerge as tiny, slimy wrigglers, mom continues to invest about two months in parental care, forsaking food to ensure the babies are well-fed. Previous research by Jared and others has documented some of the ringed caecilians’ unorthodox parenting methods. While raising offspring, the amphibian mothers’ skin changes color, developing a fatty outer-layer. The offspring use special teeth to scrape it off as a meal.  

(“It doesn’t cause any harm to the mother,” clarifies Marta Antoniazzi, a co-author on both the new study and prior skin-feeding work, and a researcher at the Butantan Institute.) But with the new research, it’s clear that caecilians have more than just skin in the game–they’re producing an additional, energetically costly food source. Females lose an average of 30% of their body weight in providing for their young, according to the study. 

Following up on past observations that caecilian broods spend a lot of time around the maternal vent, Jared, Antoniazzi, and their co-researchers collected 16 female caecilians and their young from beneath the forest floor of cacao plantations. Digging up the study subjects was “difficult” and required “great patience,” says Jared. In the lab, they housed the animals in tanks designed to mimic their natural environment, and set up cameras to record S. annulatus’ parental care. They confirmed that hatchlings ingest a secretion from their mother’s vent, and that such feedings occur multiple times a day–much more frequently than the weekly skin feedings. After each milk session, the young become less active and laze around “with bellies facing up, demonstrating apparent satiety,” according to the study. 

Milk provisioning in the caecilian Siphonops annulatus. Speed was raised 600X. Credit: Mailho-Fontana et al.

Through analyzing thin layers of tissue from different organs, the biologists found that the milk is produced by special glands that appear only during the parental care period. These temporary glands form in the skin of the caecilians’ oviducts–the equivalent of a mammalian fallopian tube. 

It’s been known for decades that some live-bearing caecilian species produce a secretion in their oviducts to nourish their young internally, thanks to earlier research from Wake. But for an egg-laying species to do a similar thing is startling. “The dogma, based on all known similar species, is that even when an egg-laying mom provides some care or stays with the young for a time, there isn’t any such provisioning,” says Wake. “Switching to something that live-bearers do is really novel,” she adds. 

More surprises

To assess S. annulatus’ milk composition, the scientists extracted the liquid from five of the caecilian mothers with careful massages and the help of gravity, according to Pedro Mailho-Fontana, lead study author and another researcher at Butantan Institute. Multiple analyses revealed the presence of carbohydrates and fat. (Though ringed caecilian milk lacks protein, the maternal skin fills that nutritional gap, says Antoniazzi.) Two types of fatty acids, palmitic and stearic acid, make up more than 90% of the caecilian milk-fat total, per the study. Three of the major fatty acids detected in the amphibian milk are also a significant part of the make-up of cow’s milk. 

Then, the cameras captured yet another surprise. Hatchlings make clicking noises and wriggling movements near the vent in the lead-up to milk feedings, says Mailho-Fontana. He and his colleagues found that these sounds and movements peak in frequency just before milk is released, suggesting the offspring are begging and the mother is responding. “Most amphibian biologists are pretty conservative about claiming communication, but it’s entirely plausible based on the recordings that this team has,” says Wake. This type of vocal food solicitation would be unique among amphibians, she notes–just another way these bizarre animals set themselves apart. 

What lies ahead

The study scientists are hoping to conduct follow-up research further examining the offspring vocalizations. Wake would like to see additional work assessing the hormonal cues that prepare a caecilian mother for parental care. “We have many other things to discover in these animals,” says Jared. Even with this new set of findings, so much remains unknown. Perhaps, as Jared suggests, the burrowing amphibians could play a critical role as soil engineers–helping plants grow. Maybe we have caecilians to thank for our chocolate bars, as they dig their way through cacao plantations. 

That scientists are still discovering such basic things about vertebrate biology proves, “we need to know more about the biology of all the species on the planet,” says Wake. “Facing climate change and habitat modification, we need to know what we’re doing to our ecosystems–our support base.” Ringed caecilians put tons of effort into supporting their young, and in the process, they’re an inevitable part of the delicate web that supports us all.

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Best overall		PetAmi Waterproof Dog Blanket		SEE IT	Washable, soft, and tear-resistant.
Best waterproof		Furhaven Waterproof Throw Blanket for Dogs		SEE IT	A waterproof blanket that looks like one you already own.
Best budget		Bedsure Waterproof Dog Blanket		SEE IT	This blanket comes in plenty of sizes at a great price.

Your house probably has a “dog blanket” that didn’t start that way. Your pooch probably stole your favorite blanket, and you let them have it because you’re a big softy. Two things can be true at once: You can love Fido with all your heart and soul and want your human blanket to remain with the humans. Enter the dog blanket. Unlike a blanket you use for lounging around, dog blankets are made with sharp teeth, nails, and messes in mind. They’re waterproof, incredibly durable, and, most importantly, comfortable for your pup. Most dog blankets look identical to the ones you use at the foot of your bed or on the edge of your sofa. And no one is wiser if it gets ruined beyond repair. Simply repurchase and hope your dog has a bad enough memory. Everyone—you, your dog, and your couch—wins when using one of the best dog blankets.

• Best overall: PetAmi Waterproof Dog Blanket
• Best splurge: PupProtector Waterproof Throw
• Best cooling: PetFusion Premium Cat and Dog Cooling Blanket
• Best waterproof: Furhaven Waterproof Throw Blanket
• Best budget: Bedsure Waterproof Dog Blanket

How we chose the best dog blankets

Two bizarre resume points make me qualified to write about dog blankets. My dad’s dog, Misty, is an 80-pound Great Pyrenees-Newfounland mix that loves to shed. I also write about human blankets and am a cat owner—I know what materials stick to fur, what weaves get snagged in claws, and I recognize the washing machine’s importance. I also conducted heavy research and looked at reviews and recommendations to narrow our picks.

The best dog blankets: Reviews & Recommendations

Whether you’re using it on top of your dog’s bed or the couch, a dog blanket makes everything cozier than before. One of our picks should bring your dog joy and keep your upholstery intact.

Best overall: PetAmi Waterproof Dog Blanket

SEE IT

Specs

• Dimensions: 29×40-60×80 inches
• Machine washable?: Yes
• Materials: Fleece polyester

Pros

• Lots of sizes for all pets
• Easy to clean
• The material stays soft after washing

Cons

• Makes a crinkle sound due to the waterproof membrane

If there’s one thing a pet loves, it’s something that’s soft, from chew toys to your own comfortable bed. This fleece blanket from PetAmi, with its double-sided fleece and internal waterproof membrane, is a step up from the regular blanket you’re currently using. It comes in all sorts of colors and sizes, meaning you can get a smaller one for the dog bed and a larger one for the couch. The price ranges from $18-$45 depending on size, meaning pet-proofing your house won’t completely drain your wallet.

An internal waterproof membrane prevents accidents from reaching the couch cushion, and a stain-resistant fabric stops muddy paws from overstaying their welcome. However, it sounds a little crinkly when folding or handling. We’d rather deal with a crinkle than a pee-stained couch, so we consider this a very minor concession.

Best splurge: PupProtector Waterproof Throw

SEE IT

Specs

• Dimensions: 60×50 inches
• Machine washable?: Yes
• Materials: Faux fur, microsuede

Pros

• Stylish
• Fluffy and soft
• Protects furniture

Cons

• Expensive
• Only comes in two sizes

If you have a larger budget and want your dog blanket to blend with your decor, the PupProtector Waterproof Throw is your pick. To clean, simply throw it in the wash and dry on low heat. Much like the PetAmi blanket, this one also has an internal waterproof lining to stop liquids from seeping through. We’re partial to the cow print, the print du jour on social media. It is expensive and only comes in two sizes—a 60×50-inch Original size and an 80×62-inch Large version—which isn’t ideal if you’re working on a budget or are shopping for a small dog.

Best cooling: PetFusion Premium Cat and Dog Cooling Blanket

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Specs

• Dimensions: 27×31-46-60 inches
• Machine washable?: Yes
• Materials: PE fabric, nylon

Pros

• Available in four sizes
• Machine washable
• Good for other animals

Cons

• Loses cooling abilities in the sunlight
• Not waterproof

Summers are particularly hard for pups: They don’t sweat like humans do and rely on panting to keep themselves cool. Consider a cooling blanket if your dog is having difficulty cooling down after a warm walk or when coming in from outside. This one from PetFusion is cold to the touch and can help your dog get back to baseline faster. If accidents are top-of-mind, you might want to layer this blanket with another on this list, as it’s not waterproof. Of course, this blanket loses its effectiveness if placed in direct sunlight. Keep your dog chill by keeping this blanket in the shade or away from the window. (And while you’re at it, consider investing in a tower fan.)

Best waterproof: Furhaven Waterproof Throw Blanket

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Specs

• Dimensions: 40×30-60×50 inches
• Machine washable?: Yes
• Materials: Polyester

Pros

• Comfortable
• Soft
• Waterproof

Cons

• On the thin side

This waterproof dog blanket matches your current decor and doesn’t scream, “I am a waterproof dog blanket,” perfect for pet parents with design in mind. One side features plush, long faux fur, while the other sports a waterproof velvet, combining a soft feel with peace of mind. It’s machine washable and comes in four sizes. It’s also well-priced, meaning you won’t feel bad buying one for the car, couch, pet bed, or chair. However, it’s very thin despite its plushness. That’s not a major dealbreaker if you use it to cover your couch.

Best budget: Bedsure Waterproof Dog Blanket

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Specs

• Dimensions: 25×35-86×108 inches
• Machine washable?: Yes
• Materials: Polyester Sherpa, flannel fleece

Pros

• Cheap but feels high-quality
• Comes in all kinds of sizes and colors
• Waterproof and leakproof

Cons

• Takes a while to dry

Bedsure makes some of our favorite throw blankets, so it’s no surprise that we’re fans of its waterproof dog blanket that comes in plenty of sizes and colors to match your dog’s vibe and crate situation. We also love the available range of sizes—you can get a small 25×35-inch blanket or a King-size behemoth that can cover your entire bed. A waterproof lining prevents any leaks from seeping through the blanket, and it’s double-sided so your dog can have more than one sensory adventure. It’s machine washable and can be dried at a low temperature, but reviews note it takes a while to dry since it’s a thick blanket. We’d take “Thick and slow to dry” over anything else.

What to consider when buying the best dog blankets

Dog blankets aren’t just for protecting furniture or lining crates. Dogs can nest, and blankets are perfect for their special spot. We all have our favorite things, dogs included. Not everyone loves barking at the mailperson or chasing after squirrels, but to each their own.

Here’s what you should know when picking the perfect dog blanket for your pup:

Material

Most dog blankers are made of synthetic materials like nylon and polyester since they’re easy to clean and don’t hold on to stains. These fabrics can also make all sorts of textures dogs love, like fleece and Sherpa.

Although natural fabrics like wool, cotton, and linen are great for humans, you should probably skip them when choosing a dog blanket. Sharp nails can snag on the weave and tear holes in the fabric, and they easily hold on to stains. Plus, these fabrics are known for their breeziness. The only breeze your dog wants is one they can chase after.

Size

Of course, you and your dog aren’t beholden to any size. If you want to buy your Italian greyhound the largest-sized blanket, we certainly aren’t stopping you. However, we don’t think your St. Bernard would love the smallest size, but stranger things have happened.

Machine washing and waterproofing

These two are a must-have feature if you have a puppy or older dog. The first allows you to clean up accidents easily, such as the messes that happen while potty training or if your canine is experiencing incontinence. The latter stops said accidents and messes from soaking through and getting on your furniture, which is exponentially harder to clean.

FAQs

Final thoughts on the best dog blankets

• Best overall: PetAmi Waterproof Dog Blanket
• Best splurge: PupProtector Waterproof Throw
• Best cooling: PetFusion Premium Cat and Dog Cooling Blanket
• Best waterproof: Furhaven Waterproof Throw Blanket
• Best budget: Bedsure Waterproof Dog Blanket

A dog blanket doesn’t just keep your dog warm—it also protects your furniture from claw marks, fur, and the occasional potty incident. They’re stylish, waterproof, soft, and often don’t break the bank. Dog blankets are made with pooches in mind, meaning they’re built to withstand getting dragged around the house or chewed on—your shoes and throw pillows can’t say the same.

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

The post The best dog blankets to keep your pooch comfortable in 2024 appeared first on Popular Science.

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The planet’s deep-sea worms survive and thrive in some pretty inhospitable places. Some are bioluminescent, glowing in regions too deep for the sun’s powerful rays to shine. Other sea worms can live surrounded by methane, one of the Earth’s most potent greenhouse gasses. Now, scientists have discovered a new species of deep-sea worm. It was found about 30 miles off of Costa Rica’s Pacific coast in an underwater methane seep. Pectinereis strickrotti is described in a study published March 6 in the journal PLOS ONE.

[Related: These newly discovered bioluminescent sea worms are named after Japanese folklore ]

Life 3,280 feet under the sea

Pectinereis strickrotti is about four inches long and its elongated body is flanked by a row of feathery, gill-tipped appendages called parapodia. Parapodia help them swim in a wavy pattern. The worms are blind, owing to the total darkness that they experience 3,280 feet under the ocean. The team believes that Pectinereis strickrotti likely has a keen sense of smell and touch to navigate this inky black world.

These deep-sea dwellers have a hidden set of robust, pincer-shaped jaws that they can thrust outwards   for feeding. While marine biologists are still not sure what they eat, they speculate that Pectinereis strickrotti may leisurely feast  on bacteria and other worms. The worms also looked red in color when lights were shone on it, likely due to its blood. 

Pectinereis strickrotti live in methane seeps. These are parts of the seafloor where this powerful greenhouse gas escapes from rocks and sediments in the form of bubbles. Unlike hydrothermal vents, methane seeps aren’t hotter than the water that surrounds them. Both are ecosystems fueled by chemical energy and not sunlight, where the tiny microbes living in them can turn methane into food. The microbes then form the base of the food web in hydrothermal vents and methane seeps, sustaining bigger creatures, including crabs, mussels, and soft-bodied polychaete worms like Pectinereis strickrotti.

This species is a member of the ragworm family, a group of about 500 species of segmented mostly-marine worms that look like a mix of an earthworm and centipede. Many species of ragworm have two distinct life stages–atoke and epitoke. As a sexually immature atoke, these worms spend most of its life on the seafloor hanging out in a burrow. In their final act, they transform into sexually mature epitokes that swim up from their homes to find mates and spawn.

Pectinereis strickrotti is also a bit unusual compared to most ragworms. It lives in the deep sea, while its kin live in shallow waters. Its parapodia are also covered with gills, where most ragworms can absorb oxygen through their parapodia without the help of fish-like gills. The males also have large spines on the end of their tails that the team believes may have to do with reproduction. 

Help from Alvin

A team from University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada in Mexico, Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Germany, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) collaborated on this discovery.

[Related: Why these sea worms detach their butts to reproduce.]

Pectinereis strickrotti was first spotted in 2009 at about 3,280 feet deep, during a dive in the HOV Alvin submersible. This human-occupied underwater exploration vehicle is operated by the WHOI and owned by the US Navy and famously played a role in helping discover the wreckage of the RMS Titanic at the bottom of the North Atlantic. 

“When we first saw it, we immediately starting asking what is was. A vertebrate? Some strange fish? We had this blurry image and that was it, but we were very intrigued,” Alvin’s lead pilot Bruce Strickrott tells PopSci. “That’s how it is down there. You see things for one minute, they’re gone, and then you talk about it.”

The team returned to the Costa Rican methane seeps in 2018. During a dive around Mound 12 of the seep, they encountered six or more individuals of the unidentified species that they first spotted back in 2009.  For an unknown reason, the sea worms were less skittish than they had been nine years earlier. Using a five-chambered vacuum canister device on Alvin that Strickrott called the “slurp gun,” the team carefully collected several specimens and enough images and video to formally describe the new species.  

“They swim slowly, but when he really wanted to move, he started to undulate almost like a living magic carpet,” says Strickrott. “The first thing that really caught my eye was just how quick it was.”

Pectinereis strickrotti is named after Strickrott, for his his piloting work that was crucial to the worm’s discovery. He says he was completely “honored and humbled” to have this new species named after him. However, this is not the only animal that bears the submersible pilot’s name. A deep-sea dwelling hagfish called Eptitretus strickrotti is also named for him.

During the 2018 expedition, the team collected three male Pectinereis strickrotti epitokes and part of one female. Tulio Villalobos-Guerrero of the Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada in Mexico conducted the primary anatomical analysis that was necessary to determine that this was a new species. The specimens are currently in Scripps’ Benthic Invertebrate Collection and the Museo de Zoología at the Universidad de Costa Rica. The National Science Foundation also supported this research.

“We’ve spent years trying to name and describe the biodiversity of the deep sea,” Greg Rouse, a study co-author marine biologist at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in a statement. “At this point we have found more new species than we have time to name and describe. It just shows how much undiscovered biodiversity is out there. We need to keep exploring the deep sea and to protect it.”

Rouse and other researchers from Scripps are planning on heading back out to sea later this year to explore deep methane seeps off the coasts of Alaska and Chile. 

The post Newly discovered deep-sea worm moves like a ‘living magic carpet’ appeared first on Popular Science.

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