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.

Seaweed is versatile; it provides habitat for marine life, shelters coastlines, and absorbs carbon dioxide. But in the United States, scientists are setting out to see whether seaweed has another particularly valuable trick hidden up its proverbial sleeve: to act as a salty, slimy source of precious minerals.

Within the US Department of Energy is the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a scientific branch devoted to tackling challenging, high-risk projects on energy technologies. ARPA-E takes big swings and looks for big rewards. And so far, the agency has awarded US $5-million to three ventures investigating whether seaweed can serve as a practical source of critical materials, such as platinum and rhodium, as well as rare earth elements, including neodymium, lanthanum, yttrium, and dysprosium.

These valuable elements, which can be captured and concentrated by seaweed, are essential to the green energy transition—and to technology more broadly. Seaweed could represent an alternative to conventional mining and other prospects, such as deep-sea mining.

“There are a lot of complexities in the entire process, and that’s why it’s in the category of ‘very exploratory,’” says Schery Umanzor, a seaweed expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a lead researcher on one of the projects funded by ARPA-E. “The chances of success are low. But if we succeed, then the implications are huge.”

Two key principles underlie this research, Umanzor says. For one, seaweed grows quickly and sucks minerals out of the water to do so. For two, seaweed’s cell walls are structured from sulfated polysaccharides—compounds made of long chains of sugar molecules. Sulfated polysaccharides are negatively charged, meaning they attract positively charged minerals floating nearby. “It’s pure chemistry,” Umanzor says. “Positive with negative, and then it just collects.”

Several years ago, Scott Edmundson, at the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington State, began digging into whether seaweed could store valuable minerals. He’d come across a paper describing how rare earth elements were accumulating in seaweed in polluted areas along Morocco’s Atlantic coast and was struck by the potential.

Reading about seaweed’s natural propensity to sieve minerals from seawater sparked a “wacky idea” to test how far the process could go, Edmundson says. So he and other PNNL scientists ran an experiment to see if they could deliberately grow seaweed to take up minerals. The project—which was also funded by ARPA-E—finished last year, though they’re continuing to dig into the topic. So far, the team’s work suggests that seaweed can be processed to produce a carbon-rich component used in concrete or biofuel manufacturing and a second mineral component containing elements such as phosphorus.

There are a lot of unknowns, says Edmundson. Different seaweeds appear to have distinct mechanisms for getting minerals out of seawater and unique ways of incorporating or concentrating them in their tissues. “There’s layers upon layers of variability that are unclear at the moment,” he adds.

Underpinning all of this research are important, unanswered questions, including why seaweed absorbs these minerals at all, whether it can do so in concentrations high enough to be useful, and whether the elements can be pulled out in a financially viable way.

The key to making all this work, says Umanzor, is figuring out how to extract metals and rare earth elements from seaweed without destroying it. For seaweed mining to make financial sense, the process needs to leave the algae in good-enough condition to still be used for other applications, including as fuel, food, or a component in bioplastic production.

Another crucial piece of the puzzle is finding the right spot to grow the seaweed. Despite their name, rare earth elements are not all that rare. These and other critical minerals are present throughout the ocean in tiny amounts. Yet there are areas where they likely exist in higher concentrations—like downstream from large deposits on land. That’s why Umanzor and her collaborators are examining if rare earth elements are sloughing off Bokan Mountain in southeast Alaska and ending up in the ocean, and whether growing seaweed in a nearby bay can snag what runs off. Bokan Mountain is being considered for conventional mining, but if it works, seaweed extraction could offer a more sustainable alternative.

Susete Pintéus, a marine biologist at the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria in Portugal, coauthored a 2022 review paper on seaweed’s role in the green energy transition. She says seaweed extraction alone—if it works—cannot completely eliminate conventional mining for these metals because the demand is so great. “[Seaweeds] can contribute,” she says, “but they will not solve the problem themselves.”

Even though seaweed collection can’t fully replace mining, Umanzor says that by extracting materials as they leach naturally out of the land—as they might on Bokan Mountain—algal mining offers a way to scoop up minerals that were going to be lost to the sea.

Umanzor never imagined that the humble seaweed could become a vessel to capture valuable materials. But in this role, it might support a more sustainable future.

“Metals have to come from somewhere, and extracting them is very destructive,” she says. “It’s worth exploring other possibilities that align more with our ideas of a greener world—or a bluer world.”

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

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This article was originally featured on MIT Press Reader. This article is excerpted from James Lawrence Powell’s book “Mysteries of the Deep“.

When HMS Challenger set sail in 1872, some scientists still believed in the azoic theory: that life cannot exist below 300 fathoms, or 550 meters. Others thought that creatures lived in the abyss, but that the cold and dark prevented them from evolving. With no more than their dredges, the Challenger scientists soon disproved both ideas.

The exploration of life at and below the surface of the dark seafloor began with a 1936 article by Claude ZoBell and Quentin Anderson of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who found abundant bacteria in the surface layers of sediment cores 40 to 75 centimeters long taken off the coast of Southern California.

The deep sea and its creatures became a subject of great interest in the 1930s, prompted by the invention of the deep-sea submersible, a sort of mini submarine built to withstand the great pressures of the abyss. The most notable of these early vessels was the two-person “Bathysphere” used by famed scientist and author William Beebe (1877–1962), whose books with their photos of bizarre deep-sea creatures fascinated and inspired youngsters of an earlier time. Engineer Otis Barton designed the vessel and he and Beebe used it to make a number of deep dives off the coast of Bermuda. In 1934, the two reached a record depth of 923 meters.

The successor to Beebe’s Bathysphere was the Alvin, named for its inventor, the eponymous Al Vine, and launched in 1964 by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. It was designed to carry two scientists and a pilot 4,500 meters down and allow them to stay at that depth for nine hours. Alvin made over 5,000 dives and fostered an estimated 2,000 research publications. But it had a rocky start, to say the least. Alvin’s first dive was in 1965 to 1,800 meters. In March 1966, Alvin was used in an unsuccessful attempt to recover a hydrogen bomb that had been lost in a midair accident and fallen to the seafloor at 910 meters depth off the coast of Spain. Then in October 1966, as Alvin was being lowered over the side of its support vessel, with crew members aboard and the hatch open, the two steel cables holding it broke. The crew was able to escape, but the vessel fell to the seafloor in 1,500 meters of water. The fortunate crew members had left their lunches behind, and when Alvin was hauled up, there the food was, intact and with no sign of attack by snacking microbes. This reinforced the view that the deep sea was inimical to significant bacterial life.

The Alvin’s most famous dive, however, was its 1986 exploration of the wreck of the ill-fated Titanic. After a complete overhaul, finished in 2014, Alvin was back on active duty at Woods Hole. In the summer of 2022, the submersible reached a record depth of 6,453 meters in the Puerto Rico Trench, meaning that Alvin could reach nearly any point on the seafloor.

Black smokers

One of the key concepts of plate tectonics is that underneath the center of the oceanic ridges lie chambers of molten magma. These heat the adjacent seawater, which rises and flows out via hydrothermal vents. In 1977, scientists made 24 dives in the Alvin to study these vents along the Galápagos Rift, an offshoot of the East Pacific Rise. They found that two-thirds of the heat lost at the rift escapes via these outlets.

Prior to these dives in the Alvin, scientists believed that photosynthesis was the ultimate and indispensable source of the energy needed to support life, meaning that living creatures could not exist in the blackness of the ocean depths. Yet the scientists aboard Alvin found abundant life in a variety of forms on the Galápagos Rift at a depth far below that to which sunlight can penetrate. Where did these creatures get the energy to sustain themselves if not from photosynthesis? Scientists had answered that phytoplankton, which consists of microscopic plants and lives near the surface, die and sift down as “marine snow,” a term coined by Beebe and a process recognized by the Challenger scientists. Rachel Carson described it in her book “The Sea Around Us”: “When I think of the floor of the deep sea … I see always the steady, unremitting, downward drift of materials from above, flake upon flake, layer upon layer—the most stupendous ‘snowfall’ the Earth has ever seen.” The dead phytoplankton fall to the dark, abyssal ocean floor and provide a food source for organisms living there. According to this theory, photosynthesis would still be the ultimate energy source for the creatures of the abyss.

But the hydrothermal vents on the Galápagos Rift held a concentration of organisms thousands of times greater than the seafloor around them. Some unrecognized process within the vents—not photosynthesis—was providing the energy on which the vent ecosystem depends. It turned out to be “chemosynthesis,” in which bacteria oxidize inorganic materials, primarily hydrogen sulfide, in chemical reactions that in turn provide the energy to sustain higher life forms. Black, irregular chimneys mark some vents where chemicals that had been dissolved in the hot water have precipitated as dark sulfides when the hot vent water meets the cold ocean. Scientists subsequently found these “black smokers” in many places in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as stranded on land—for example, along the California coast where plate tectonics has lifted an old ocean floor well above sea level.

The creatures of the vent ecosystems ultimately depend on the sulfur-reducing bacteria—which we could almost say “breathe” sulfur—and include many strange denizens never before seen. None were stranger than the tube worms, which measure up to 3 meters long but are only 4 centimeters wide and live in clusters of thousands of individuals per square meter. They depend on the bacteria for energy and have no need for a digestive system. Their existence in such inhospitable conditions once again raised questions about what other life forms could exist at and below the seafloor.

Thomas Gold

If life can exist in the depths of the ocean, could a significant portion of all life on Earth be in those depths, rather than above them? That was the thesis of one of the most inventive and iconoclastic scientists of the second half of the 20th century. Thomas Gold was born in Austria in 1920 to Jewish parents who fled to England in 1938 after Hitler annexed Austria. Gold entered Trinity College at Cambridge, but when World War II broke out the British interned him as an enemy alien and deported him to a camp in Canada. After 15 months there, he was allowed to return to England, where he reentered Cambridge to study physics and worked on the all-important radar. Gold’s multifarious interests and accomplishments are enough to fill a book, or several. It is no surprise that he would be one of the first to explore the larger implications of the deep hydrothermal vents.

In a provocative 1992 article, “The Deep, Hot Biosphere,” and in a 1999 book of the same title, Gold extrapolated from the microbial life of the vents to propose that such life also existed in abundance beneath the seafloor. He went so far as to suggest that subsurface microbial life could be comparable in mass and volume to all life on the surface. Microbial life could be pervasive everywhere beneath Earth’s surface in the pore spaces between mineral grains—and not only on Earth but also on other bodies in the solar system: the Moon and Mars, for example. They have too little air and water to sustain life on their surfaces, but it could well exist below. Perhaps microbial subsurface life came first, protected from the surficial violence of the early solar system and using chemosynthesis, then evolved into photosynthetic life. Gold thought that microbial life might be widespread in the universe, a concept known as panspermia which goes back to the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in the fifth century BCE. Many notable scientists have endorsed the idea, but with no way to test it, attention shifted to the possibility that the organic building blocks of life might have been present throughout the solar system at its beginning.

Drilling the abyss

The detection of life beneath the seafloor was the goal of one of the earliest Deep Sea Drilling Projects (DSDP) voyages, Leg 15 in 1970, led by chief scientist Wallace Broecker of Columbia University. The crew found methane, a byproduct of microbial activity, in sediments 800 meters beneath the seafloor and tens of millions of years old. In October 1986, the crew of DSDP Leg 96 drilled the Mississippi Fan, a submarine pile of sediment in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. They found subsurface microbial activity down to 167 meters beneath the seafloor. By the end of the century, the Ocean Drilling Program had sampled 14 sites for evidence of bacterial activity. A summary of these studies found that although the number of microbes typically decreases with depth beneath the seafloor, living cells are still present down to 700 meters. The authors came to the remarkable conclusion that the biomass in the top 500 meters of seafloor sediments equals 10 percent of that of the total surface biosphere. These early results suggested that living bacteria likely exist at greater depths than drilling had yet reached. This led to the first expedition designed specifically to study subsurface life.

In the spring of 2002, Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 201 drilled in two locations, one on the continental margin off Peru and the other in the equatorial Pacific. The subsurface ecosystems turned out to have a great diversity of microbes, including not only the sulfate-reducing bacteria found at the vents but a new type that got its energy from carbon reactions. The microbes were “alive” in that they engaged in metabolic activities such as repairing DNA and undergoing cell division. They included all three domains of life: archaea (one-celled organisms), bacteria, and eukaryotes (cells that have a nucleus). By this time, scientists estimated that subsurface bacterial life could amount to one-third that of Earth’s total living biomass. In 2003, ODP Leg 210 drilled the seafloor off Newfoundland and upped the ante once again. It found living bacterial cells 1,626 meters below the seafloor, in rocks 111 million years old, at temperatures of 113 degrees Celsius. This led the authors to estimate that bacteria in subsurface sediments may make up as much as two-thirds of total bacterial biomass.

In October 2010, expedition 329 of the Integrated Ocean Discovery Program (IODP), which followed the ODP, drilled in the South Pacific Gyre, some of the deepest water on Earth. It is the largest of the five giant oceanic systems of rotation that move enormous volumes of seawater. The South Pacific Gyre rotates counterclockwise, bounded by the equator to the north, Australia to the west, South America to the east, and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to the south. Its center is the “oceanic pole of inaccessibility”: the location farthest from any continent. The South Pacific Gyre has one of the lowest sedimentation rates in the oceans and its bottom sediments have the lowest cell concentrations and the least metabolic activity of any. To discover the most extreme conditions under which life can exist on Earth, this is the place to go.

Aboard the JOIDES Resolution, still hard at work after all these years, in water nearly 6 kilometers deep, the scientists drilled 100 meters into the seafloor. They found microbes all the way to the bottom of the cores, albeit not as many as in the richer areas closer to the surface. The scientists estimated that the deepest microbes were at least 100 million years old, making it seem they could only be fossils. Surely nothing could “survive,” whatever that means exactly, for 100 million years. But when brought back to the lab and offered nutrients, the microbes began to grow and multiply.

This seemingly fantastic discovery raised the question of what the microbes beneath the gyre had been doing for 100 million years. Perhaps the cells had too little food to divide, but enough to repair damaged molecules. But that “seems insane,” said Steven D’Hondt, one of the leading authorities on microbial life in the seafloor, who wondered whether there is not another undiscovered source of energy—possibly radioactivity—that could support slow cell division.

On Expedition 337 of the IODP, the Japanese drilling ship Chikyū (Earth), designed for deep-sea drilling, cored to a depth of 2,466 meters beneath the seafloor off Japan’s Shimokita Peninsula. It found microorganisms in coal and shale that resemble those in the soil of modern tropical forests. These microbial communities are thought to be relics of those that inhabited soils about 20 million years ago, rather than more modern microbes that might have migrated into the coal layers from elsewhere. To explore the upper temperature limit at which microbes can survive, on Leg 370 of the IODP, Chikyū drilled in the Nankai Trough subduction zone off Cape Muroto in south-central Japan. The drill reached 4,776 meters and the deepest core was collected at 1,177 meters, where the temperature measured 120 degrees Celsius. Microbial life was detected all the way to the bottom of the sediment column. The cells at that depth appeared to spend most of their energy repairing the damage caused by the high temperature. Several authorities had written that the temperature limit to life in the subsurface was 80 degrees Celsius, but Gold had predicted that the upper temperature limit on bacterial life would be in the range of 120 to 150 degrees Celsius—and he turned out to be right.

Martians

These findings from scientific ocean exploration suggest that microbial life may be pervasive everywhere beneath Earth’s surface under conditions long thought to be inhospitable, if not fatal. This raises the possibility that, as Gold postulated, bacterial life may have existed and may still exist on other bodies in the solar system, including Mars. This despite the Red Planet’s hellish surface conditions, continually blasted by lethal radiation from the Sun and the cosmos. The surface temperature of Mars averages negative 60 degrees Celsius and is so dry that a cup of water would vaporize instantly. A group of scientists experimented with a terrestrial bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans, said to be the toughest on Earth according to Guinness World Records, to test whether it could survive on Mars. This creature thrives in nuclear reactors. They found that if buried 9 meters underground, D. radiodurans could withstand Martian levels of radiation for 280 million years.

Later this decade, the European Space Agency plans to send a spacecraft to Mars that will drill more than 2 meters below the surface and analyze the organic molecules found there. How will we humans react if, when life is discovered on another planet, it looks nothing like us, nor even little green men, but is microbial? If evidence of microbial subsurface life is found on Mars, it may have been the first lifeform in the solar system, where, protected from the surficial violence and using chemosynthesis, it could indeed have evolved into photosynthetic life and eventually, us. If Earth and Mars harbor subsurface bacterial life, why not other planets as well?

James Powell is a retired geologist and university administrator. He is the author of several books, including “The Inquisition of Climate Science” (Columbia University Press), “The 2084 Report: An Oral History of the Great Warming” (Simon & Schuster), and “Mysteries of the Deep,” from which this article is excerpted.

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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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Lots of stuff we throw away could easily go into compost. But getting started with composting can be tricky. Do it wrong, and you’ll stink up your whole kitchen. Vitamix’s Food Cycler makes it easy, and right now, it’s down to $299, which is $100 off of its regular price at Amazon.

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Chuck food waste and other compostable items into the Food Cycler’s two-liter canister and then close the carbon lid. When you run the device, it circulates air through the chamber and pulls moisture from the material without creating a smell in your house. Once it’s done, your waste will be considerably smaller and easy to mix into your garden soil, where it will work as a natural fertilizer. This is a great way to reduce the amount of food byproducts you send to the landfill and improve your garden simultaneously. Plus, it runs almost silently, so you don’t have to worry about making too much noise in your kitchen—one of the many reasons Vitamix tops our best compost bins.

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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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Dyhia Belhabib’s journey to becoming a marine scientist began with war funerals on TV. Her hometown, on the pine-forested slopes of the Atlas Mountains in northern Algeria, lies only 60 miles from the Mediterranean Sea. But a trip to the beach was dangerous. A bitter civil war raged across the mountains as she was growing up in the 1990s; the conflict was particularly brutal for Belhabib’s people, the Berbers, one of the Indigenous peoples of North Africa. As she puts it: “We didn’t go to the ocean much, because you could get killed on the way there.”

The ocean surfaced in her life in another way, on state-run television. When an important person was assassinated or a massacre occurred, broadcasters would interrupt regular programming to show a sober documentary. They frequently chose a Jacques Cousteau film, judged sufficiently dignified and neutral to commemorate the deaths. Whenever she saw the ocean on television, Belhabib would wonder who had died. “My generation thinks of tragedies when we see the ocean,” she says. “I didn’t grow to love it in my youth.”

By the time she was ready for university, the civil war had ended. The Islamists had lost the war, but their cultural influence had grown. Engaged at 13 to a fiancé who wanted her to become a banker, Belhabib chafed at the restrictions. Her given name, Dyhia, refers to a Berber warrior queen who successfully fought off invading Arab armies over a thousand years ago; Queen Kahina, as she is also known, remains a symbol of female empowerment, an inspiration for Berbers and for the thousands of Algerian women who took up arms in the war of independence. In a society where one in four women cannot read, Belhabib realized she didn’t want to go to university only to spend her life “counting other people’s money.

One day, her brother’s friend visited their house. He was a student in marine sciences in the capital city, Algiers. When he described traveling out to sea, Belhabib felt a calling for an entirely unexpected path. “It was,” she recalls, “a career I had never heard of, and one that challenged every stereotype of women in Algerian society.” Soon after the visit, she moved to Algiers to study at the National Institute of Marine Sciences and Coastal Management, where she was one of the only women in her program. She also broke off the engagement with her fiancé, so that she could focus full-time on studies. She still vividly remembers her feelings of freedom, fear, and unreality on her first trip out to sea. While other students dove for samples, she floated on top of the water, trying to survive. “I never learned how to swim, and I still don’t know how,” she admits.

Belhabib graduated at the top of her class, but was repeatedly rejected when she applied to universities overseas. Her luck turned when she met Daniel Pauly, one of the world’s most famous fish scientists, at a conference. Unintimidated by the fact that Pauly had just won the Volvo Prize—the environmental equivalent of a Nobel—she introduced herself and told him she wanted to study with his team. Although she did not yet speak fluent English, Pauly accepted her as a student. When she began her doctoral research, over 90 percent of the world’s wild fisheries had been eradicated, and Pauly was sounding the alarm about a new, global surge in illegal fishing that was decimating marine food webs and depriving coastal communities of livelihoods. He wanted her to work on Africa, where illegal fishing had reached epidemic proportions.

Belhabib spent the next few years in West Africa. When her research uncovered the extent of illegal fishing to feed Chinese and European markets, she made the front page of the New York Times. “Being African myself, I was able to bring people together to openly share data in a way they never had before,” she explains. It’s not hard to imagine her corralling government officials: Disarmingly frank and engagingly energetic, the whip-smart, hijab-wearing Belhabib stands a little over five feet tall and talks a mile a minute, with a self-deprecating laugh and a talent for gently posed, bitingly direct questions.

Her startling findings touched a nerve. Tens of thousands of boats commit fishing crimes every year, but no global repository of fishing crimes exists. A fishing vessel will often commit a crime in one jurisdiction, pay a meager fine, and sail off to another jurisdiction, thus operating with impunity. If a global database of fishing vessel criminal records could be created, Belhabib realized, there would be nowhere left to hide. She suggested the idea to a variety of international organizations, but the issue was a political hot potato; national sovereignty, they argued, prevented them from tracking international criminals. Undeterred, Belhabib decided to build the database herself. Late at night, while her infant son was sleeping, she began combing through government reports and news articles in dozens of languages (she speaks several fluently). Her database grew, word spread, and her network of informants—often government officials frustrated with international inaction on illegal fishing—began expanding. She moved to a small nonprofit and began advising Interpol and national governments. The database, christened Spyglass, grew into the world’s largest registry of the criminal history of industrial fishing vessels and their corporate backers. But the registry, Belhabib knew, was useful only if the information made its way into the right hands. So in 2021 she cofounded Nautical Crime Investigation Services, a startup that uses AI and customized monitoring technology to enable more effective policing of marine crimes and criminal vessels at sea. Together with her cofounder Sogol Ghattan, who has a background in ethical AI, she named their core algorithm ADA, in homage to Ada Lovelace—the woman who wrote the world’s first computer program.

Belhabib is attempting to tackle one of the most intractable problems in contemporary environmental conservation: illegal fishing. Across the oceans, the difficulty of tracking ships creates ideal cover for some of the world’s largest environmental crimes. After the end of World War II, the world’s fishing fleets rapidly industrialized. Wartime technologies that had been developed for detecting underwater submarines were repurposed for spotting fish. The size of nets grew exponentially, and offshore factory ships were outfitted so they could spend months at sea, extending the reach of industrial fishing into the furthest reaches of the ocean. As the world’s population grew, fish protein became an increasingly important source of food. But warning signs soon appeared: crashes in key fish populations, an alarming trend of “fishing down marine food webs,” and a series of cascading impacts that rapidly depleted marine ecosystems.

In the wake of depleting stocks, fishers should have responded by reducing their take. Instead, they redoubled their efforts. After the world’s leading fishing nations—China and Europe are the largest markets—overfished their own waters, they began exporting industrial overfishing to the global oceans. China’s offshore fishing fleet of several hundred thousand vessels, which received nearly $8 billion in government subsidies in 2018, is now the largest in the world.

Governments of wealthier nations subsidized massive fleets of corporate-backed vessels to fish the high seas, using bottom trawling and drift nets stretching for dozens of miles, killing everything in their path. Artisanal fishers were squeezed out, and as fish stocks collapsed, rising food insecurity generated protests and political unrest. In West Africa, for example, fishing boats from the world’s wealthiest nations have depleted local fisheries to such an extent that waves of migrants—faced with food insecurity and uncertain futures—have begun fleeing their homes in a desperate, risky attempt to reach European outposts such as the Spanish Canary Islands; thousands of migrants have died at sea. The smaller fishing fleet, meanwhile, has struggled to remain solvent; impoverished fishers are increasingly vulnerable targets for criminal organizations seeking mules for hire to transport drugs, or boats to serve as cover operations for human trafficking.

Over 90 percent of the world’s fish stocks are now fished to capacity or overfished. Despite this, scientists’ calls for reduced fishing have largely fallen on deaf ears. Conventional attempts to manage fisheries are stymied by the limits of logbooks and onboard human observers, and local electronic monitoring systems. Fishing boats that exceed quotas or fish in off-limits areas are rarely caught, operating with impunity in front of local fishermen’s eyes; and even if caught, they are even more rarely punished.

Marine panopticon

The world’s oceans are experiencing an onslaught: As fish have become scarcer, illegal fishing has surged. Rather than merely document the decline of fish stock, Belhabib decided to do something about it. Her solution: to combine ADA, her AI-powered database of marine crimes, with data that tracks vessel movements in real time. She began by tracking signals from the marine traffic transponders carried by oceangoing ships—also known as automatic information systems (AIS). AIS signals are detected by land transceivers or satellites and used to track and monitor individual vessel movements around the world. AIS signals are also detected by other ships in the vicinity, reducing the potential for ship collisions. Belhabib and her team then built an AI-powered risk assessment tool called GRACE (in honor of the pioneering coder Grace Hopper), which predicts risks of environmental crimes at sea. When combined with vessel detection devices such as AIS, GRACE provides real-time information on the likelihood of a particular ship committing environmental crimes, which can be used by enforcement agencies to catch the criminals in the act. Belhabib’s database means that criminal vessels—which often engage in multiple forms of crime, including human trafficking and drug smuggling, as well as illegal fishing—now find it much harder to hide.

The high seas are one of the world’s last global commons, largely unregulated. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea provides little protection for the high seas, two-thirds of the ocean’s surface. The adoption of a new United Nations treaty on the high seas in 2023 will create more protection, but this will require years to be implemented. Even within 200 nautical miles of the coast, where national authorities have legal jurisdiction, most struggle to monitor the oceans beyond the areas a few miles from the coast. And beyond the 200-mile limit, no one effectively governs the open ocean.

So Belhabib hands her data on human rights and labor abuses over to Global Fishing Watch, a not-for-profit organization that collaborates with the national Coast Guards and Interpol to target vessels suspected of illegal fishing for boarding, apprehend rogue fishing vessels, and police the boundaries of marine parks. The observatory visualizes, tracks, and shares data about global fishing activity in near real time and for free; launched at the 2016 U.S. State Department’s “Our Ocean” conference in Washington, it is backed by some of the world’s largest foundations. Its partners include Google (which provides tools for processing big data), the marine conservation organization Oceana, and SkyTruth—a not-for-profit that uses satellite imagery to advance environmental protection.

Global Fishing Watch uses satellite data on boat location, combined with Belhabib’s data on criminal activity, to train artificial intelligence algorithms to identify vessel types, fishing activity patterns, and even specific gear types (tasks that would require human fisheries experts hundreds of years to complete). The tracking system pinpoints each individual fishing vessel with laser-like accuracy, predicts whether it is actually fishing, and even identifies what type of fishing is underway. Their reports have revealed that half of the global ocean is actively fished, much of it covertly.

Fred Abrahams, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, explains that this approach is just one example of a new generation of conservation technology that could act as a check on anyone engaged in resource exploitation. His team at Human Rights Watch uses satellite imagery to track everything from illegal mining to undercover logging operations. As Abrahams says: “This is why we are so committed to these technologies . . . they make it much harder to hide large-scale abuses.” Abrahams, like other advocates, is confident that the glitches—for example, AIS tags are not yet carried by all fishing vessels globally, poor reception makes coverage in some regions challenging, and some boats turn off the AIS when they want to go into stealth mode—will eventually be solved. Researchers have recently figured out, for example, how to use satellites to triangulate the position of fishing boats in stealth mode—enabling tracking of so-called dark fleets. These results can inform a new era of independent oversight of illegal fishing and transboundary fisheries. Meanwhile, researchers are developing other applications for AIS data, including assessments of the contribution of ship exhaust emissions to global air pollution, the exposure of marine species to shipping noise, and the extent of forced labor—often hidden, and linked to human trafficking—on the world’s fishing fleets.

It’s a herculean task for one organization to police the world’s oceans. And Global Fishing Watch’s data is mostly retroactive; by the time the data is analyzed and the authorities have arrived, fishing vessels have often left the scene. What is still lacking is a method for marine criminals to be more effectively tracked in real time, and apprehended locally. This is where Belhabib’s next venture comes in. She is now working with local governments in Africa—where much illegal fishing is concentrated—to provide them with trackers and AI-powered technologies to catch illegal fishing and other maritime crimes in the act. As she notes: “When you ask the Guinean Navy how much of their territorial waters they can actually monitor, it’s only a fraction of a vast area. They simply don’t have the resources.” Belhabib’s system pinpoints vessels that may be committing infractions, and assesses the risk live on screen. This allows the Coast Guard and other agencies such as Interpol to more easily find illegal fishers, while reducing the costs of deployment, monitoring, and interdiction.

She cautions, however, about the use of similar digital technologies to track illegal migrants. The European Union, for example, has strengthened its “digital frontier” through satellite monitoring, unmanned drones, and remotely piloted aircraft, in some cases relying on private security and defense companies to undertake data analytics and tracking. But these technologies are often focused on surveillance rather than search and rescue of migrants stranded at sea. As Belhabib relates: “Recently I spoke with the Spanish Navy and they told me they watched over 100 people die when a boat full of migrants capsized and they could only save a few people. They told me, ‘We take their fish away, they risk their lives to have a better and decent life.’ It’s heartbreaking and avoidable.” In Belhabib’s view, Digital Earth technologies should prioritize ecological and humanitarian goals, rather than surveillance and profit.

Digital Earth technologies enable more rapid detection and, in some cases, prediction of marine crimes. Digital monitoring, combined with artificial intelligence, allows precise analysis of fishing vessel locations and movements at a global scale. Although this does not guarantee enforcement, it could enable more efficient policing of the world’s oceans. The use of digital technologies enables conservationists to tackle two common flaws that lead to failures in environmental enforcement. First: data is scarce; if available, there is often a time lag, geographical gaps, or data biases. This makes evidence-gathering difficult or impossible. Second, enforcement often comes too late. Environmental criminals can be prosecuted, but legal victories are uncertain, and happen after the damage has been done. These shortcomings of contemporary environmental governance—sparse data, unenforceable regulations, and patchy, sporadic enforcement that punishes but fails to prevent environmental harm—can be overcome by digital monitoring, which mobilizes abundant data in real time to gather systematic evidence and enable timely enforcement.

These techniques appear to be achieving some success. In Ghana, for example, there has been a long-standing conflict between industrial fishing boats and small-scale, artisanal fishers using canoes and small boats to fish near the shore. Satellite data has helped the government’s Fisheries Enforcement Unit track and reduce the incursions of larger fishing boats into near-shore waters. In Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago country with the second-longest coastline in the world, the government has entered into an agreement with Global Fishing Watch data to monitor fisheries and share the data about vessels’ movements publicly online, a major step forward in transparency in fisheries enforcement. The Indonesian partnership is an example of the longer-term aim of Global Fishing Watch: to share its geospatial datasets and online mapping platform with governments around the world.

Despite these recent gains to combat illegal fishing, digital tech is also exacerbating the underlying problem, as fishers themselves have started taking advantage of digital strategies. One example is the growing use of fish aggregating devices, which use acoustic technology, combined with satellite-linked global positioning systems, to better spot schools of fish. Fishers can effectively assess location, biomass, and even species, allowing them to aggregate and fish more efficiently. Digitization is ratcheting up the already intensely competitive fishing industry and accelerating the overfishing of endangered species.

Even if conservationists can win this digital arms race, there is a more fundamental problem: The underlying structural drivers of overfishing—consumer demand, particularly in Asia and Europe, and a lack of adequate governance for the high seas—are not solvable by digital technologies alone. Governance reform and digital innovation must work in tandem. For example, in the absence of government regulation, digital monitoring of fishing on the open ocean would be unlikely to scale up. But the adoption of the new UN treaty on the high seas in 2023 included a significant commitment to creating new Marine Protected Areas, aligned with Global Biodiversity Convention’s commitment to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s land and oceans by 2030.

These new developments create an impetus for digital monitoring; and, in turn, digital monitoring will increase the likelihood that Marine Protected Areas will be effective at protecting fish populations. This illustrates two key points about environmental governance in the 21st century: the interplay between digital and governance innovation, and the fact that planetary governance of the environment is possible only with planetary-scale computation.

Karen Bakker was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Professor at the University of British Columbia, and the Matina S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was the author of “The Sounds of Life” (Princeton University Press) and “Gaia’s Web,” from which this article is excerpted. Karen Bakker died on August 14, 2023.

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Ever worry that you will run out of places to explore in America? Lucky for you, there are 63 national parks and 429 national park sites across the country—it will take a long time to work your way through the 85 millions acres they encompass. And with additional sites being earmarked for conservation (West Virginia’s New River Gorge was just designated as a national park in 2021, for example), the list of destinations keeps growing and growing.

Remember, it takes some planning to visit the national parks, though the journey you make of it will be worthwhile. One way to optimize the experience is by targeting the lesser-known parks. Avoid the snaking lines at the Grand Canyon and take in the wrinkly sandstone at Capitol Reef. Skip the tortuous campsite-booking system at Acadia and sleep on the sands of Indiana Dunes. Smaller parks might mean fewer amenities and tour outfitters, but that’s where the real beauty of wilderness shines through.

In 2024, National Park Week runs April 20 to April 28. On April 20, entrance fees will be waived to kick off this year’s celebration and encourage people to sign off of screens and visit a national park in person.

Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota

Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas

North Cascades National Park, Washington

Lassen Volcanic National Park, California

Capitol Reef National Park, Utah

Biscayne National Park, Florida

Congaree National Park, South Carolina

Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska

New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, West Virginia

Indiana Dunes National Park, Indiana

Haleakalā National Park, Maui, Hawaii

Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona

Bonus National Lakeshore: Picture Rocks, Michigan

This story was originally published in 2023 and updated in 2024.

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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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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.

Douglas Wallace was on a research ship in the middle of Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence when he heard the news: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had met with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, in nearby Stephenville, Newfoundland. At their meeting in August 2022, the two leaders locked in Canada’s commitment to supply Germany with hydrogen gas. They chose to declare the “Canada-Germany hydrogen alliance” in Stephenville because the town is the site of the proposed World Energy GH2 project, a facility that will use wind power to produce hydrogen gas.

The announcement allowed the world leaders to demonstrate the shared goals of increasing the availability of so-called green hydrogen and of reducing Germany’s reliance on Russian oil. But for Wallace, the news triggered a different idea.

At sea, Wallace, an oceanographer at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, was tracking how dissolved oxygen moves from the Atlantic Ocean through the gulf into the St. Lawrence River, and how the dearth of oxygen in some places can lead to the development of low-oxygen dead zones. In particular, he was concerned with one extra big and persistent dead zone that had taken up residence near Rimouski, Quebec, along the outlet of the St. Lawrence River. So when he heard that Canada was set to ramp up hydrogen production—achieved by electrically splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen—he wondered: could all of that spare oxygen help bring the dead zone back to life?

For those who live on land, it’s easy to take abundant oxygen for granted. But underwater, persistent patches of low oxygen are “a fundamental control on habitat,” says Wallace.

As the world warms, the oceans are losing their oxygen. Since the 1950s, they’ve already lost about two percent—a figure that could hit four percent by the end of this century. The loss can be caused by excess nutrient runoff, as with the vast dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico, and by changes in ocean circulation driven by climate change—the likely culprit in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Too little oxygen in the water can reduce the diversity of marine life as animals either leave the area or die. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence—where the size of the dead zone has grown nearly sevenfold since 2003 to encompass roughly 9,000 square kilometers—dropping oxygen levels are already affecting many commercially important and at-risk species, such as cod, halibut, and northern shrimp, Wallace says. “About 15 percent of the deeper parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence are getting close to the threshold where a lot of marine animals will struggle to live,” he says.

Currently, scientists can do little to fix oceanic dead zones. In smaller bodies of water, such as lakes and reservoirs, managers can pump oxygen-rich water from the surface into oxygen-poor deep areas. But the ocean is way too big to be artificially churned. Maybe, thought Wallace, he could take the oxygen created during hydrogen production and somehow pump it into the gulf.

His calculations suggest that it could work. The proposed Stephenville plant would produce more than enough oxygen to replace what the gulf loses each year. And Wallace’s experiments tracking how oxygen moves through the region show that oxygen pumped into the gulf near Stephenville would reach the Rimouski dead zone several hundred kilometers away within a few years.

Sean Leet, CEO of World Energy GH2, says the company is actively investigating uses for the oxygen produced by the hydrogen plant and that he’s met with Wallace to discuss the idea. The company would support further research and discussions around how it might work in practice, he says.

Even with Leet’s interest, however, the viability of Wallace’s oxygenation scheme is far from certain.

For starters, Wallace’s plan relies on the existence of large-scale hydrogen production. While the Stephenville plant seems to be on track to be built, Mark Winfield, who studies sustainable energy and climate change at York University in Ontario, says that, in general, the hydrogen market has an iffy future. The market “is smaller than some think, and the transition to hydrogen will be harder than they think,” he says.

Hydrogen fuel cells are still extremely expensive, Winfield says, and in many ways—such as the rush to decarbonize transportation—hydrogen has already lost the race. Hydrogen as a fuel makes the most sense for large industrial applications that cannot easily be electrified such as cement and steel production. But at present, no hydrogen-powered steel plants have been built. “The market is not at all mature, and there has been no increase in demand,” says Winfield.

In many cases, he says, rather than using renewable electricity to produce hydrogen, it’s probably better to just send that power to the grid.

Leet, however, counters that there is potentially a big market for hydrogen in Europe—particularly in Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium—with applications in steel manufacturing, heavy industry, aviation, and marine fueling. “Their demand for clean fuels far exceeds what Canada and other countries will be able to supply,” he says.

Beyond the big questions about the future of hydrogen manufacturing, pumping dead zones full of oxygen would also require overcoming many lingering engineering challenges and environmental concerns, says Wallace. This includes figuring out how exactly to capture the oxygen and deliver it to the deep ocean. But Wallace says these are not insurmountable challenges; companies already do something similar in lakes on a much smaller scale.

Wallace also wants to determine what effect pumping large amounts of oxygen into the water would have on the local ecosystem and figure out how to fine-tune a process with a years-long lag between adding the oxygen and having it arrive at the dead zone. “We’d really want to do a small, controlled pilot before rushing in,” says Wallace.

And while the companies producing hydrogen would likely welcome a market for oxygen, a potentially valuable byproduct with no clear buyers, it’s unclear how it could generate revenue for them. Wallace suggests some form of credit, similar to carbon credits, but all the details would need to be worked out.

Despite the uncertainty, Wallace thinks it’s an avenue worth pursuing. “There are risks, but there are also risks to parts of the ocean becoming uninhabitable,” he says. “These are difficult questions, but we can’t avoid asking them, especially if there is a chance we can do something about it.”

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

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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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As droughts continue to deplete the Panama Canal’s water levels, the maritime trading hub’s operators are planning a workaround. On Wednesday, Panama officials announced a new Multimodal Dry Canal project that will begin transporting international cargo across a “special customs jurisdiction” near the 110-year-old waterway.

The Panama Canal, which connects Atlantic and Pacific trading routes, has been in dire straits for some time. To function, ocean vessels pass through a series of above-sea-level “locks” filled with freshwater provided by nearby Lake Gatún and Lake Alajuela. Older Panamax locks require about 50 million gallons of freshwater per ship, while a small number of “Neo-Panamax locks” built in 2016 only require around 30 million gallons.

[Related: When climate change throws the Pacific off balance, the world’s weather follows.]

But the canal’s upgrades can’t keep up with climate change’s cascading effects. Lake Gatún and Lake Alajuela are replenished with rainwater, and a lingering drought compounded by El Niño has resulted in the second-driest year in the Panama Canal’s existence. To compensate, the daily average number of ships allowed to pass through the lock system has been reduced from 38 to 27, while each vessel is also now required to carry less cargo. Operators hope to soon raise that average to pre-drought levels, but likely at a cost to local marine ecosystem health and local drinking water supplies. Meanwhile, as the AFP reports, marine traffic jams routinely see over 100 ships waiting to pass through the 50-mile passage.

The new Multimodal Dry Canal project announced this week will attempt to further alleviate a global trade problem that particularly affects the Panama Canal’s most frequent users—the US, China, Japan, and South Korea.

Ship crews shouldn’t need to wait for a yearslong engineering process before seeing some relief to the passage’s congestion. During a presentation of project plans this week, Panamanian representatives said no additional investment or construction is needed. Instead, the dry thoroughfare will function as a complement to the canal by employing “existing roads, railways, port facilities, airports and duty-free zones,” according to the AFP on Wednesday.

Speaking with the BBC earlier this month (before the dry canal’s reveal), a shipping company general manager said such landbased detour routes could be costly—expenses that are “usually passed onto the consumer.”

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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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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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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.”

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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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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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In Mondim de Basto, Portugal, travelers on a small group tour with Exodus Adventure Travels lean over a clear-as-glass river from a grassy bank, collecting water and squeezing it through a filter. When they’re done, that filter will be shipped off to a lab for analysis. The lab will catalog the DNA collected that indicates which species are found in local waterways–all in the name of filling gaps in global biodiversity data.

On an expedition off the coast of Greenland, cruisers on the small HX (formerly Hurtigruten Expeditions) ship peer over the edge of a zodiac, watching for the moment as a white disk disappears beneath the waves so they can take a depth measurement and submit it using an app to scientists who can then study phytoplankton.

[ Related: How to become a citizen scientist—and when to leave it to the professionals ]

None of the individuals collecting this data are professional scientists; just ordinary travelers with a fierce curiosity and desire to leave the far-flung places they visit better than they found them by participating in citizen science. Data collection isn’t just for researchers–travelers are often perfectly suited to help bolster the dearth of data to be documented across scientific disciplines around the world.

While the term citizen science may sound amateur (how much reliable information can individuals without doctorates in chemistry or biology even contribute?), the areas of scientific study that utilize information gathered by everyday individuals span the gamut, from environmental science to marine biology.

And the data non-scientists are able to provide often proves invaluable.

In fact, one study showed that citizen-collected scientific data contributes, or could potentially contribute, to 40 percent of United Nations Sustainable Development goals. It offers grassroots organizations and small operations a way to access centralized knowledge, which is paramount in modern scientific communities and informs peer-reviewed studies and results in meaningful research.

One study from 2021 utilized citizen-collected data to help inform a paper on ocean transparency while another study from 2023 utilized publicly-collected data to study and report on algae blooms in natural waterways.

How does your summer vacation fit in? Seamlessly.

“We are privileged enough to spend a lot of time in extremely remote areas where conducting scientific research has very high costs and is often prohibitive for some scientists,” explains Marcos Goldin, geologist and citizen science coordinator at sustainably-minded expedition cruise line Aurora Expeditions.

So citizen science provides a way to collect and share data from not just easily-reachable fields of study, but across the globe, including in often underrepresented, neglected or hard-to-reach parts of the world where the greatest data gaps tend to exist. In short, travel, especially the kind that involves going off-the-beaten track, is the perfect excuse to collect and record meaningful data.

Learn while you play

But the value this information brings to the scientific community isn’t all citizen science projects are good for. “These programs also create unique opportunities for education, enhancing travelers’ understanding of the unique regions and ecosystems that we often visit, and their importance to the overall health of our planet,” Goldin says, referring to the social and environmental benefits that travel can have.

“There’s something about being on holiday and being an active participant and understanding your role as an individual that allows you to have a deeper connection to the community and places you visit,” says Rochelle Turner, head of sustainability at Exodus Adventure Travels, a tour company that offers a number of trips with a strong citizen science component. One includes collaborating with NatureMetrics in partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to collect water samples in several destinations. The results from the samples feed into the eBioAtlas, a world-wide biodiversity database that maps the distribution of species around the world.

That database is made available to researchers and conservationists–locally and around the world–to help inform land and water management, provide a blueprint for healthy ecosystems, and update the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, highlight key biodiversity areas, and more.

Likewise, several small expedition cruises like Aurora Expeditions and HX offer science programs on their ships, everything from micro plastics studies in the arctic to whale or bird identification, many of which tend to add meaning to a trip and foster a closer connection to nature, highlighting why it needs to be protected and ultimately transform a destination, Turner says.

“We are all becoming increasingly more aware that travel is about much more than just visiting a new place,” adds Goldin. “We believe responsible travel should not only seek to respect the destination’s environment, but should also aim to make positive contributions and leave the place better than when we found it.”

Travelers are also able to see the results of their efforts, either in the reports Exodus sends to guests post-trip, by viewing phytoplankton under a microscope in the lab, or via regular updates when spotted wildlife makes an appearance somewhere else in the world.

Find a citizen science experience

Fortunately, more and more travel brands, from Linblad Expedition cruises to Intrepid Travel tours, offer citizen science departures in places ranging from polar regions to the Amazon.. Many sustainably-minded companies put citizen science projects front and center in their marketing, so they’re not hard to find.

I can do science all by myself

That said, you don’t need to book a dedicated tour or cruise to participate in citizen science projects when you travel. To contribute to many databases, all you need is your phone: There are many apps available for free that walk you through the process of logging information on everything from clouds to birds to whales.

Other projects, like collecting phytoplankton readings using a Secchi Disk, may require a few more tools.

[ Related: You can help measure the ocean’s health with this homemade gadget ]

If you are going it on your own, make sure to read instructions carefully and follow them to the letter. Most apps will walk you through the process. Then, use them as often as you like while you travel.

“By engaging in Citizen Science, we can truly create a positive impact for the places we visit and their future protection,” says Goldin.

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This article was originally featured on Undark.

On a sunny fall morning, biologist Andy Hubbard set up a makeshift lab next to small pools at a national park’s outcropping of ancient granite rocks. Immersed in the stillness of a cactus forest, he and his team filled tiny bags with murky water and meticulously strained it through miniscule filters.

Those filters would later be sent to a laboratory to test for genetic material shed by animals in the water. By collecting environmental DNA, or eDNA, Hubbard and three other members of a National Park Service team hoped to detect signs of native critters and the invasive bullfrogs that have proved devastating for their existence.

“This technology will end up being critical because it’s a more efficient way to detect invasive species, as well as rare species,” said Hubbard, program manager for the National Park Service Sonoran Desert Network in Tucson, Arizona.

Around the world, scientists like Hubbard are increasingly turning to eDNA to detect species from discarded bits of skin, scales, and mucus in water, soil, and air. In the field of conservation research, the emerging technology is opening new frontiers to monitor endangered species, track invasive ones, and sample general biodiversity. It’s also cheaper. And while the field still faces limitations around accuracy and precision, scientists say eDNA is fast becoming a game-changer for wildlife conservation efforts.

“Environmental DNA has become more and more important as we are putting increased emphasis on understanding biodiversity and importantly, biodiversity loss,” said Adam Sepulveda, a research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center in Bozeman, Montana.

In such a rapidly growing field, technological innovation has been key to advancing eDNA methodologies, especially as scientists attempt to move past constraints in the field: While some researchers continue to use traditional tools, like visual surveys, traps, and nets, others are banking on portable robots to collect more frequent samples, or advanced lab analysis methods to take stock of biodiversity. Meanwhile, Sepulveda and other scientists have said there should be a national strategy for eDNA application, which, they say, would avoid inconsistent guidelines across agencies, and make the eDNA analysis more efficient.

The scientific community now recognizes that eDNA is a useful lens through which much can be learned about species that are difficult to identify using only traditional tools, said Sepulveda: “eDNA gives us some power to understand what could be happening with these harder-to-find species.”

The exploration of environmental DNA started in the 1980s with researchers studying microbes or microorganisms, such as bacteria, fungi, and algae. But it wasn’t until the early 2000s that the use of eDNA started gaining momentum as methods and technologies evolved, and more scientists began adopting the approach. Research into aquatic ecosystems exploded after the 2008 publication of a study on eDNA testing from samples collected in wetlands in France that detected the presence of invasive American bullfrogs.

That arena of early detection and management of invasive species has been one where eDNA has held particular promise. Rather than conduct time-intensive, often difficult and intrusive surveys, researchers can now rely on a tiny sample of eDNA to determine the existence of species before they cause serious harm to ecosystems, as well as organisms too small to see with the naked eye.

The technology is a particularly useful tool for tracking invasive species because of its high sensitivity. It “can detect DNA evidence from just a few individuals at the start of an invasion,” Sepulveda wrote in an email.

Time is key, since once invasive species spread and get established in a new environment, they pose a major threat to native animals and their habitats. They can also cause significant destruction to infrastructure. For example, the diminutive zebra mussel, a shellfish discovered in the Great Lakes in the 1980s, can clog water intake for power and water plants and damage boats and equipment. It’s believed that zebra mussels first arrived with ballast water discharged from European ships, and they now live in the Mississippi River Basin, Great Lakes, and many other bodies of water throughout the nation.

Such unfettered expansion comes at a high price: The annual cost of managing invasive species in the United States soared from $2 billion per year in the 1960s to $21 billion per year since 2010, according to a study published online in 2021. Globally, the economic cost related to invasive species over nearly 50 years is estimated at around $1.3 trillion.

In southern Arizona, the American bullfrog—which is native to the eastern U.S. and Canada—is a major source of distress. The voracious critters eat everything in their path, destroying native species like the federally threatened Chiricahua leopard frog.

Not only do the amphibians compete with smaller native species of frogs for food and space, but they also can spread disease-causing pathogens like chytrid fungus and ranaviruses, which in turn also contribute to native populations’ decline. “The American bullfrog is probably the most important and impactful non-native invasive animal in the Southwest,” Hubbard said.

In the hopes of tracking their spread, Hubbard and his springs-monitoring crew have collected eDNA in several national parks within Arizona and neighboring New Mexico.

At the eDNA collection last fall, Hubbard’s team spent an entire morning at Tucson’s Saguaro National Park, scooping out and filtering 1,000 milliliters—roughly four cups—of water from the pool. Filters the size of a dollar coin trap loose cells and DNA present in water samples, so team members carefully folded them with tweezers into tiny triangles and placed them in sterilized test tubes. Hubbard expects to have lab results from the DNA analysis by the early part of the year.

Like other researchers, Hubbard has grappled with some of eDNA’s limitations. For one, DNA can degrade quickly in water, particularly in warm weather. “As the water temperature increases, the remaining DNA starts to break down,” he said.

And eDNA does not shed light on species abundance, such as that of declining native frog species. A spring called “The Grotto” in Saguaro National Park “has lowland leopard frogs based on my results, but I can’t tell you how many, and I can’t tell you if that number has changed over time,” he said. The technology can only tell whether certain eDNA is present or not.

He’s also learned that eDNA may not be suitable for detection of certain species, such as those that shed sparse genetic material. That includes the threatened northern Mexican garter snake, which visual surveys previously have recorded in marshy areas, but eDNA has yet to uncover.

“We’re trying to optimize our sampling for multiple species,” Hubbard said. “And there’s always a trade-off. When you do that, there are going to be different approaches that will be more or less successful in detecting species, depending on their habitat or on their behaviors. So, this probably isn’t the best way to detect northern Mexican garter snakes.”

Hubbard said the possibility of false negatives, when eDNA can miss species that may be present in the environment, or false positives, when the technology can detect species that are absent, could also pose challenges. Nevertheless, in the case of the garter snake, he said potential errors may be overcome with intensified water sampling combined with traditional tracking methods, such as placing wooden boards for snakes to hide under in wetland habitats. This allows researchers to lure snakes into areas they can easily access during surveys.

Where Hubbard sees the most value for the eDNA parks project is for monitoring frog populations to set conservation actions for native species, which include the eradication of invasive bullfrogs detected. “That’s our highest priority and highest concern right now,” he said.

Another limitation of the technology is related to sampling: While Hubbard’s team spent a few hours filtering water, they couldn’t stay all day—or overnight. Sepulveda, the USGS research scientist, says that robots roughly the size of carry-on luggage could help.

At the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, he and his colleagues are working on how best to incorporate eDNA and robot technology to address shortcomings in freshwater bodies battling the infestation of zebra mussels, quagga mussels—originally from Eastern Europe—and other aquatic invasive species. By using robots that can collect multiple eDNA samples over longer periods, fewer researchers will have to do the task.

Sepulveda’s work largely focuses on invasive species and supporting natural resource managers throughout the country in dealing with them, including those in the Columbia River Basin. “That is—or was until a few months ago—the last major water basin in the lower 48 to not yet be invaded by zebra or quagga mussels,” he said.

In September, quagga mussels were found in Idaho’s Snake River, the largest tributary of the Columbia River. The Columbia flows through seven states and a Canadian province. Natural resources agencies continue to monitor the area after moving quickly to contain the invasive species with a chemical treatment that also killed thousands of fish. Trying to control mussel infestation is an uphill battle, Sepulveda said. Female zebra and quagga mussels can produce up to 1 million eggs a year. Besides destroying native aquatic life, mussels attach themselves to hard surfaces like boat hulls that can carry them over long distances.

The researchers have tested robots that can collect eDNA water samples to reduce the cost of monitoring for invasive species and overcome some of the pitfalls of the technology—like the false negative results of the northern Mexican garter snake known to slither in the wild.

The robots, also called autonomous samplers, are designed to filter and preserve eDNA not only from invasive species, but also any aquatic and semi-aquatic organisms that leave genetic traces behind. Sepulveda leads a project dubbed READI-Net—short for “Rapid environmental DNA Assessment and Deployment Initiative and Network”—in which researchers are developing a leaner version of a robot that the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California, built some years ago for ocean exploration.

When ready for use in freshwater, the robots will be set up on shores, on fixed floating docks, or on boats. “They’re not meant to be submerged,” Sepulveda said of the robots. “They have tubes that go into the water to pull the water in, but the actual robotics are meant to be on land.”

Unlike humans, the freshwater robots will be able to collect samples much more frequently, day or night, increasing the likelihood of species detection. Collecting eDNA can be a challenge, said Sepulveda, because the currents that form in lakes, rivers, and oceans can carry it away from the organisms that discard it. And given its continued decay, the more time that passes, the harder it is to capture it.

“If you get your scoop of water, there is a chance, especially when something is very rare, that you were there 10 minutes too early or potentially 10 minutes too late—or a day too early, or a day too late,” he said. “And so, one of the ways that we can increase our ability to detect a new invader, just like our ability to detect the Covid virus, is by collecting more samples.”

The robots will be able to collect up to 144 samples before a scientist or technician would need to gather them for analysis, he said. “It can be left to collect samples for weeks to months.”

Jim Birch, director of the SURF Center—Sensors: Underwater Research of the Future—at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, likened the robots to a stripped-down version of the environmental sample processor, an older underwater robot originally built to study harmful algal blooms, also called red tides, that can kill animals.

As eDNA technology became more popular, Birch said, two postdoctoral researchers at the institute tested whether the robot could successfully collect eDNA samples from the aquarium. The experiment worked. Filtered water samples not only picked DNA traces of fish, but also detected genetic bits of the turkey and chicken feed that fish had gobbled up.

After some field testing, the robot is now being redesigned for optimal use in freshwater, Birch said: “It will have a big effect on invasive species, but its use is much broader.”

Sepulveda said field deployments of a prototype are just beginning this year. “We’re hoping by 2025 to have 10 that are ready to go and that we can get out to our partners,” he said.

The robotic eDNA-gathering technique will be especially useful in programs with limited manpower, he said. “If we can detect these invasive species and figure out what they are and where they are very early in the invasion process, then we’re likely to limit the economic and ecological costs of that invasion.”

The collection of eDNA is just the first step in trying to identify species from the bits of themselves they leave behind as they roam different habitats. The dead skin, saliva, scat, and other cellular material that organisms shed must then be analyzed in a laboratory using molecular methods.

At Washington State University’s School of the Environment, associate professor Caren Goldberg extracts the DNA trapped in the filters that Hubbard sends from southern Arizona. “We do one species at a time, and then sometimes we have to do some extra cleaning on the samples, and then we process all the data, and we double-check it to make sure everything looks good before sending it back,” she said.

Environmental technology is a valuable tool for finding elusive species like frogs, Goldberg said. She knows how slippery the creatures can be because, as a University of Arizona student, she completed her master’s thesis after chasing barking frogs in the mountains and surveying Chiricahua leopard frogs that can be difficult to see in murky, and often deep, water holes.

“The reason why I could see how exciting the whole field would be is because I spent so much time out in Arizona looking at these ponds and not being able to find the frogs,” she said.

Goldberg now works with various federal and state agencies using eDNA techniques in their conservation programs. For the southern Arizona project, she looks for genetic signs of such species as local leopard frogs and the large bullfrogs that devour the small, native amphibians, contributing to their population drop. The federal government considers the Chiricahua leopard frog, which now emits its snore-like mating call in a shrinking habitat, a threatened species.

In earlier samples from Hubbard, Goldberg has detected the invasive frog. She has also tested for the presence of endangered jaguars that trail cameras have photographed in the borderlands. The sample was from ponds where Hubbard had hoped a stealthy, thirsty feline might have left its saliva, but no DNA traces were found.

Since Goldberg seeks to detect single species at a time, she uses a laboratory technique called quantitative polymerase chain reaction, or qPCR. It’s an analytical technique similar to the one used to test for Covid-19 infection. And while the methodology is widely used in single-species detection, it’s not suitable to detect multiple species from a mixed sample. Instead, scientists are increasingly using eDNA metabarcoding, which is a relatively new approach that can detect a large number of DNA sequences.

The advent of eDNA metabarcoding and next generation sequencing has been a breakthrough, said Jan Gogarten, an evolutionary community ecologist at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health in Germany. “We can sequence the diversity in a single sample, and that unlocks the opportunity to look at different sources of eDNA that animals shed in the environment,” he said. “You don’t have to now have a pure sample, like a biopsy of the animal.”

A visit to Kibale National Park in Uganda gave Gogarten and some of his colleagues a chance to work on an eDNA project that yielded some surprises. Gogarten, along with fellow researcher Christina Lynggaard and other colleagues, swiped low-hanging plant leaves in the park’s tropical forest to see if airborne eDNA had settled on them. A lab analysis later detected dozens of species—mammals like the African elephant and birds like the grey crowned crane.

“It really blew our minds at how much diversity we were detecting just by one swab,” said Gogarten, who also is affiliated with the Department of Applied Zoology and Nature Conservation at the University of Greifswald.

The most unexpected detection was a fish. “We detected a catfish genus, and they live in the rivers there, so they’re around, but they’re not the sort of thing that you would expect would be, like defecating or coming in contact with the leaves,” he said.

Gogarten and his colleagues were perplexed. “Catfish are unique in that they can leave the water, so they sometimes do go on land,” he said. “But our best guess is actually that they probably were eaten by one of the bird species, and the bird was up on a tree and defecated on the leaves.”

As the field expands, the high risk of contamination in the lab remains a struggle for researchers, which Gogarten attributed to the sensitive methods used in eDNA analysis. Other molecules that “may be floating around in lab spaces from previous experiments can cause problems—as can small traces of animal DNA if the extraction areas are used for extracting tissues,” wrote Gogarten in an email to Undark.

To reduce the risk, researchers can set up lab controls and separate workspaces for eDNA analysis, he said. “It’s something that one really needs to be careful with when one is doing eDNA, and it’s something that the field is trying to create, these norms or guidelines that if you want to do eDNA, you have to follow steps to avoid contamination,” said Gogarten. “If we start doing poor and shoddy lab work and publishing it, if we muddy the waters, then we undercut the confidence in the results.”

As promising as eDNA lab methods are, they also have limits. For example, every organism has a sequence, or barcode, associated with it; scientists identify the specimens by comparing barcodes with those archived at DNA reference libraries. But if a species is not listed in the database, then eDNA cannot identify it.

Still, the technology is a boost for assessing biodiversity—meaning taking stock of the variety of species living in certain areas. “Now we can start thinking about projects where you can look at biodiversity along this park edge of Kibale and collect tens of thousands of swabs and do a very high-resolution mapping of biodiversity along these park edges,” he said.

And eDNA could help determine the distribution of biodiversity and help create effective, large-scale management strategies for preserving it, Gogarten said. “It’s an exciting time because the technology is becoming more and more available.”

So far, much of the eDNA research has focused on identifying species in rivers, oceans, lakes, and spring-fed pools like those in southern Arizona national parks. Hubbard said the relative ease and low cost of collecting eDNA samples means the technology is here to stay. He and his team started collecting eDNA in the spring of 2022 and will continue to do so in the coming year.

He expects the technology to keep improving as it provides information that can help natural resource managers to make decisions. In fact, several companies are developing portable lab units to do real-time detections in the field. Those devices are likely several years away from being ready to deploy, and some element of lab work may always be required, he says, but it’s one of the exciting developments for this technology.

For now, he and his team will use eDNA results to come up with a plan for the best way forward. “Our ultimate goal is to have these be healthy wetlands that are sustaining native species again,” he said. “And so we’re trying to take a little pause and get that bigger picture and use the data that we have to inform that.”

Sepulveda expects the national strategy, which he is now working on with the Biden administration, could improve eDNA application and data-management tools in natural resource management, among other possible outcomes. That strategy is scheduled to be made public in June 2024.

“This eDNA strategy is hoping to create a framework, or at least a roadmap, for how to be more coordinated and be more effective and how to take eDNA science, how to continue to improve it for the next 10 to 20 years,” he said.

Meanwhile, the technology keeps gaining a foothold in worldwide conservation. In South Africa, scientists rediscovered a golden mole that had not been sighted since 1937 by tracking its eDNA in sand. In Brazil, eDNA helped scientists rediscover a frog they believed had gone extinct since it had not been seen since 1968. And in the Mediterranean Sea, scientists collected genetic material shed by the endangered and evasive angel shark.

But the vast oceans remain largely unexplored and eDNA is an important tool to unravel the unknown, said Kelly Goodwin, a marine molecular microbiologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The technology is enhancing the agency’s numerous tools that allow scientists to explore ocean life and protect it, she said.

“There are as many microbes in the ocean as there are stars in the sky,” she said. “There’s a great deal that we do not know about the biology on our planet, including the invisible majority, which is the microbial Earth.”

Goodwin said eDNA technology advances will help answer questions not only about invisible organisms in the deep ocean, but also inform the composition of species—rare, endangered, or invasive—throughout the ecosystem.

“There is a lot of life on this planet that we know very little about,” she said. “And the only lens we have to view it is through their DNA.”

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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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Despite their reputation for being easy for aspiring plant parents to destroy, orchids can be found all over the planet. There are more than 25,000 known species of these plants, with more discovered every year. An international team of scientists have now found a new species of orchid in Madagascar with an impressive nectar spur and has a tie to Charles Darwin. Solenangis impraedicta is described in a study published March 11 in the journal Current Biology. 

[Related: This new species of pink orchid looks like delicate glasswork.]

Madagascar is known for flowers with long floral tubes that are pollinated by long-tongued hawkmoths. The most famous orchid species on the island is Angraecum sesquipedale, which is also called Darwin’s orchid. The famed naturalist and orchid enthusiast had a theory that the flower was pollinated by a moth that was unknown at time. About 41 years after this prediction, scientists officially described the large hawkmoth proving Darwin correct. 

The newly discovered species is appropriately named Solenangis impraedicta. In Latin, impraedicta translates to “unpredicted” and is a nod to Darwin’s eventually correct prediction that a specific moth is the orchid’s primary pollinator. The newly discovered orchid has a nectar spur that is almost 13 inches long, despite having petals that are less than one inch. These tube-like projections from a plant’s petals produce and retain nectar for pollinators like bees, butterflies, and moths. Solenangis impraedicta has the third longest spur scientists have ever recorded. 

“The contrast between the little 2 centimeter (0.7 inches) flowers and the hyper-long nectar tube is mind-blowing,” study co-author and Coimbra University Botanic Garden botanist João Farminhão said in a statement. 

The species with dainty white petals and a yellow-ish stem was first collected by Missouri Botanical Garden field botanist Patrice Antilahimena, during a baseline environmental impact study of a mine site in central eastern Madagascar. A new location of these orchids was discovered about 10 years later by Brigitte Ramandimbisoa and a Ph.D. student at the New York Botanical Garden Simon Verlynde. 

It belongs to the angraecoid orchids group also called “Darwin’s pollination guild.” It is currently threatened by mining activities and possibly by poaching for the orchid trade. The authors hope that the discovery will boost conservation efforts.

“Discovering a new orchid species is always an exciting event, but finding such amazing and charismatic species happens only once in a scientist’s career,” study co-author and Missouri Botanical Garden botanist Tariq Stévart said in a statement. “I really hope that this highly threatened species draws attention to the urgent crisis that is affecting Madagascar’s biodiversity and helps support [Missouri Botanical] Garden’s program there.”

[Related: This incredibly rare orchid survives by making male beetles horny.]

The between Solenangis impraedicta’s discovery and its formal scientific description allowed the team to bank some of its seeds and grow them in undisclosed locations to help conserve the plants.

“A precautionary approach is required when publishing such a spectacular new species,” said Stévart. “Wild populations must be protected and monitored and detailed information on their precise coordinates must be kept out of the public domain. So, don’t ask us to reveal where we found it, somewhere in Madagascar.”

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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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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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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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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. 

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When their kin aren’t attacking boats and porpoises or monitoring their large adult sons, some pods of orca whales are also known to attack the fearsome great white shark. Groups of these marine mammals are known to hunt and kill these giant fish in an epic battle of apex predators. Now, a solitary orca–aka killer whale–has been observed eating a great white shark for the first time. The findings are described in a study published March 1 in the African Journal of Marine Science.

“The astonishing predation, off the coast of Mossel Bay, South Africa, represents unprecedented behavior underscoring the exceptional proficiency of the killer whale,” Alison Towner, a study co-author and shark biologist from Rhodes University in South Africa, said in a statement. 

Pack hunters–Willy vs. Jaws

Typically, orcas work together in groups to catch their prey–most often sea lions, seals, sharks and even other whales. When hunting together in a pod, they surround their prey and use combined strength and intelligence to attack. South Africa’s white sharks are predators in their own right and known for their stunning acrobatics and solo hunting. 

[Related: Watch what can happen when killer whales tangle with great white sharks.]

In 2022, the same research team revealed that a pair of orca named Port and Starboard had been hunting and killing South Africa’s white sharks since 2017. Their predatory behavior has since driven large numbers of the sharks away from their natural aggregation sites. While orca whales can hunt large animals individually, this most recent occurrence is the first time that a single whale has been observed attacking a great white shark.

‘The scent of shark liver oil’

This incident was observed in June 2023 near Seal Island in Mossel Bay, about 248 miles east of Cape Town and is challenging conventional beliefs about the cooperative hunting behaviors in the region. Starboard the orca was working alone to “incapacitate and consume” an eight foot-long juvenile white shark in only two-minutes. Later, the orca was observed carrying the shark’s liver in its mouth. 

“Upon reaching Mossel Bay’s Seal Island, the scent of shark liver oil and a noticeable slick indicated a recent kill. Tracking Port and Starboard near the island, they remained separated,” Esther Jacobs, from marine conservation initiative Keep Fin Alive, said in a statement recounting the day. “Witnessing a white shark’s fin break the surface initially sparked excitement, but that turned to a somber realization as Starboard swiftly approached. The moment Starboard rapidly preyed on my favorite shark species was both devastating and intensely powerful.”

What Jacobs and the others on the water that day were observing is a specialized feeding behavior. Orca in South Africa appear to have a strong preference for eating the lipid-rich livers of white sharks.

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

“Over two decades of annual visits to South Africa, I’ve observed the profound impact these killer whales have on the local white shark population,” added Primo Micarelli, from the Shark Studies Centre and Siena University in Italy. “Seeing Starboard carry a white shark’s liver past our vessel is unforgettable.”

At least two great white sharks were killed during these interactions, as a second carcass measuring 11.6 feet was also found nearby. 

“This sighting revealed evidence of solitary hunting by at least one killer whale, challenging conventional cooperative hunting behaviors known in the region,” said Towner. 

Shifting dynamics at sea

In addition to offering some new insight into predatory behavior in orcas, it’s also helping provide context to the ecosystem changes that may happen when orcas displace sharks as the apex predator. Understanding the dynamics at play as killer whales continue to prey on large sharks underscores the need for conservation strategies that can be adapted in a timely manner as the environment and ecosystem changes. 

[Related: Great whites don’t hunt humans—they just have blind spots.]

“The observations reported here add more layers to the fascinating story of these two killer whales and their capabilities,” ecologist Simon Elwen said in a statement. “As smart, top predators, killer whales can rapidly learn new hunting techniques on their own or from others, so monitoring and understanding the behaviors used here and by other killer whales in South Africa is an important part of helping us understand more about these animals.”

Elwen is a whale ecology expert at the University of Stellenbosch and Founding Director and Principal Scientist at Sea Search Research & Conservation. He was not an author of this specific study. 

These new findings and future studies should provide scientists in the region with more insight in how to adapt conservation measures. According to Towner, skilled “shark spotters” in Cape Town documented a record of over 300 great white shark sightings across eight beaches in 2011. Since 2019, there haven’t been any sightings in the area, as the sharks are moving further away from Cape Town. Threats from orcas like Port and Starboard and dwindling resources have prompted these great white sharks to begin to move further away. 

“Despite my awe for these predators, I’m increasingly concerned about the coastal marine ecology balance,” said Micarelli.

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All eyes are on two new avian internet celebrities and their cozy home in Southern California. Three bald eagle chicks could hatch any day now from their nest atop a Jeffrey pine tree overlooking Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles. Onlookers from near and far can follow along via a live stream monitored and maintained by the nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley.

[Related: Lockdown made cities friendlier for some birds.]

The eggs were laid in late January by a bald eagle named Jackie. According to the nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley, she sat on the eggs for over two and a half days when the region was hit with a snowstorm. She sat there keeping those eggs warm for 61 hours and 58 minutes without a single break. Incubating duties have been shared with their father, Shadow, who has also supplied Jackie with plenty of fish. 

The nest is about five feet across and five feet deep and offers beautiful lake and mountain views. According to the nonprofit,  a three-egg clutch like this is rare for bald eagles and is a first for Jackie. Biologists monitoring the situation are watching for a “pip.”

“The pip is when there’s a visible bump or crack in the eggshell that we can see,” biologist and Friends of Big Bear Valley executive director Sandy Steers told the Los Angeles Times. “Even when there’s a pip, it’s going to take at least a day—sometimes longer—for the chick to hatch. With nature, we need to be patient. It can teach us to just breathe and enjoy the process instead of focusing on the result.”

March 1 officially marks 36 days since the first egg was laid and Jackie’s eggs have previously piped at 38 and 39 days.

The weather is also adding to the excitement and anticipation. Another winter storm is barreling towards the region, with a winter storm watch posted for Big Bear Lake for the evening of Friday March 1 through the afternoon of Sunday March 3. Because of the storm, it is possible that the hatching will happen off camera, as Jackie or Shadow will sit on the nest to keep them protected from the cold and wet weather. Adult eagles have about 7,000 waterproof feathers that should help keep the chicks warm if they hatch in the storm. 

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

This nest camera was installed in 2015 by Friends of Big Bear Valley and documents breeding successes and failures every season. In that time, Jackie and Shadow have laid five eggs that have produced eggs. In January 2023, Jackie laid eggs and spent weeks incubating them. The two then began to leave them unattended. Ravens breached the eggs in March, but revealed no obvious signs of development inside. Only about 50 percent of bald eagle eggs hatch.

The large and iconic American bald eagle has been brought back from the brink of extinction. According to the American Eagle Foundation, there were only 417 known nesting pairs in the lower 48 states in 1963. Since then, it has since skyrocketed to at least 316,700 known individual bald eagles, including 71,400 nesting pairs. Banning the pesticide DDT and other conservation measures enforced during the 1970s have helped the species rebound. However, they are still in danger of lead poisoning, bird flu, habitat destruction, and collisions with human made infrastructure. 

This is a developing story, please check back for updates. 

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Less than 4,500 tigers remain in the world, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Habitat loss continues to pose an immense existential threat to the planet’s largest cat species—a problem compounded due to the animals residing in some of Earth’s most ecologically at-risk regions and landscapes.

To better monitor the situation in real time, NASA, Google Earth Engine, and over 30 researcher collaborators are announcing TCL 3.0 today, a new program that combines satellite imagery and powerful computer processing to keep an eye on tigers’ existing and reemerging ecosystems.

“The ultimate goal is to monitor changes in real time to help stabilize tiger populations across the range,” Eric W. Sanderson, VP for Urban Conservation at the New York Botanical Garden and first author of a recent foundational study published in Frontiers in Conservation Science explained.

[Related: A new algorithm could help detect landslides in minutes.]

“Tiger Conservation Landscapes,” or TCLs, refer to the planet’s distinct locales where Panthera tigris still roam in the wild. Because of their size, diet, and social habits, tigers require comparatively large areas to not only survive, but flourish.

According to researchers, stable tiger populations “are more likely to retain higher levels of biodiversity, sequester more carbon, and mitigate the impacts of climate change, at the same time providing ecosystem services to millions of humans in surrounding areas.” In doing so, TCLs can serve as a reliable, informative indicator of overall environmental health markers.

Unfortunately, the total area of Tiger Conservation Landscapes declined around 11 percent between 2001 and 2020. Meanwhile, potential restored habitats have only plateaued near 16 percent of their original scope—if such spaces were properly monitored and protected, however, tigers could see a 50 percent increase in available living space. 

Using this new analytical computing system based on Google Earth Engine data, NASA Earth satellite observations, biological info, and conservation modeling, TCL 3.0 will offer environmentalist groups and national leaders critical, near-real time tools for tiger conservation efforts.

“Analysis of ecological data often relies on models that can be difficult and slow to implement, leading to gaps in time between data collection and actionable science,” Charles Tackulic, a research statistician with the US Geological Survey, said in today’s announcement. “The beauty of this project is that we were able to minimize the time required for analysis while also creating a reproducible and transferable approach.”

Researchers say government and watchdog users of TCL 3.0 will be able to pinpoint tiger habitat loss as it happens, and hopefully respond accordingly. National summaries of initial available data can be found through the Wildlife Conservation Society, with more information to come.

TCL 3.0 provides an unprecedentedly complex and advanced monitoring system for one of the planet’s most threatened creatures, but as researchers note in their new study, the solution is arguably extremely simple.
“What have we learned about tiger conservation over the last two decades? Conservation works when we choose to make it so,” the authors conclude in their recent report. “Conservation is straightforward. Don’t cut down their habitat. Don’t stalk them, harass them, or kill them or their prey. Control poaching and extinguish the illegal trade in tiger bones and parts. Prevent conflicts with people and livestock wherever possible, and where and when not, then mitigate losses to forestall retaliation.”

Correction 2/27/24 5:53PM: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the world’s remaining tiger population. PopSci regrets the error.

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Our oceans are vast and discovering new and lost species are among some of the most exciting discoveries in the big blue. An international team of scientists may have found more than 100 new species, during a mission to explore seamounts off the coast of Chile. These creatures who look like they come from a sci-fi novel call the 1,800-mile-long Salas y Gómez Ridge home. 

[Related: A sea creature extinct for half a billion years inspired a new soft robot.]

Seamounts are large underwater mountains that are often formed by volcanic activity and can be found in every ocean basin on Earth. They are a critical habitat for everything from corals and mollusks, up to crustaceans, fish and marine mammals. This newly explored underwater mountain chain comprises more than 200 seamounts and stretches from offshore Chile to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). 

Over the course of the expedition, the team mapped an area of more than 20,000 square miles of seafloor and discovered four new seamounts within Chile’s waters. They also explored two of Chile’s marine protected areas–the Juan Fernandez and Nazca-Desventuradas marine parks.

[Related: New jellyfish discovered near Japan may contain multitudes of venom.]

Researchers deployed an underwater robot named ROV SuBastian to collect data from the seamounts. ROV SuBastian can safely dive more than 14,000 feet under the Pacific and the data it collected will be used to advance protection of these underwater habitats. The scientists found that each seamount hosted distinct ecosystems. Many of these ecosystems are vulnerable, including sponge gardens and deep-sea coral reefs. 

Back on dry land, the team will spend the next several years analyzing the genetics and physiology of the specimens that they believe are new to science to confirm if they actually are new species.

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Coral reefs all over the world are in serious danger. However, a critical way to keep reefs healthy likely comes from a lowly animal, some of whom spray goo out of their butts in self-defense. According to a study published February 26 in the journal Nature Communications, about 25 percent of coral reef’s health is dependent on sea cucumbers that keep the reefs clean. 

[Related: Surprise! These sea cucumbers glow.]

Over harvesting a critical member of the reef

Coral reefs currently face numerous threats, from ocean temperatures soaring to 100 degrees Fahrenheit to light harming their reproduction to bleaching. Reef health also may depend on sea cucumbers and the role that they play in the reef ecosystem. There are more than 1,200 species of sea cucumbers in the world’s oceans. These marine invertebrates can be less than an inch long up to six feet long and use their butts for both eating and breathing. They gobble up sediments on the ocean floor and on coral reefs similar to robot vacuum cleaners, sucking up, digesting, and then excreting sediments and eating bacteria. However, sea cucumbers have been over harvested for hundreds of years and cannot cannot reproduce in low density areas and are much more difficult to find.

“Humans have largely extirpated sea cucumbers from much of the world’s oceans and are still collecting thousands of tons per year,” Georgia Tech university marine ecologist Mark Hay tells PopSci. 

Between 2022 and 2020, annual wild harvests of sea cucumbers increased by about 30 percent. According to the authors of this study, this overharvesting is likely having direct effects on reefs, since removing predators from the ecosystem can have cascading effects on the ecosystem. Overhunting of otters for their pelts has led to degradation of kelp forests in California. Wolves can help keep the beaver population in check, and prevent their dams from creating ponds that turn forests into wetlands.

‘Scum suckers in the great fishtank of Earth’

To gather more concrete data on the role sea cucumbers play on the reef, Hay and research scientist and ecologist Cody Clements looked at Mo’orea, a tropical island in French Polynesia. Clements has planted upwards of 10,000 corals over the course of his career. He was planting coral in the sand off the island shore where many sea cucumbers were present. When he cleared them out, he noticed that the corals started to die. 

[Related: Scientists are intentionally bleaching and ‘cryopreserving’ coral.]

“I’ve planted a lot of corals in my day, and my corals generally don’t die,” Clements said in a statement. “So I thought there must be something to this.” Clements is also a co-author of this new study.

With this oddity in mind, Hay and Clements designed an experiment. The team set up patches to monitor the health of the coral with and without sea cucumbers. They marked the patches with GPS and monitored their health daily. 

They found that the coral patches without sea cucumbers had a white band developing at the base of the corals. This white band would eventually work its way up and kill the entire coral colony. Hay refers to this as the “white band of death” and it is associated with coral diseases seen all over the world.

The presence of sea cucumbers appeared to suppress the spread of coral disease. Hays and Clements found that corals without sea cucumbers present were 15 times more likely to die. They conducted a similar experiment in Palmyra Atoll, part of the U.S. Minor Outlying Islands. This experiment used different coral species and different sea cucumbers, but yielded similar results. Sea cucumbers seemed to be a major missing component of what had previously been an intact ecological system. 

“If you remove all the scum suckers in the great fish tank of Earth, you’re going to get a dirty tank eventually,” Clements said. “People have paid lip service to the idea that sea cucumbers could be important for a long time, but we didn’t know the scale of their importance until now.”

An ecological fuse?

In future studies, Hay says the team hopes to investigate which coral species are most susceptible and most resilient to a drop in sea cucumber populations, which sea cucumber species are the most critical to reef function, and study the effects of warming ocean temperatures and added nutrients on reef and sea cucumber health. 

The team also warns of the effects of removing so many sea cucumbers from the ecosystem, and urges major cutbacks to pollution and overharvesting in order to increase sea cucumber populations and reef health at the same time.

“This removal may have lit an ecological fuse that has been slow burning for decades but is now blowing up as devastating episodes of coral disease as we nutrify and heat the ocean, both of which advantage pathogens,” says Hay. “Just as sanitation workers were ‘essential workers’ during COVID, sea cucumbers may be essential workers on the reef. But we are only now recognizing their role and critical importance.”

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Dive into the curiosities of our vast oceans, captured in stunning detail by photographers.

Alex Dawson of Sweden swam away with the top honor at the 2024 Underwater Photographer of the Year competition for an eerie image titled “Whale Bones.” Photographers from around the world submitted 6,500 underwater photographs, but it was Dawson’s captivating image that won over the judges.

“Whale Bones was photographed in the toughest conditions,” noted Alex Mustard, chair of judging panel. “As a breath-hold diver descends below the Greenland ice sheet to bear witness to the carcasses. The composition invites us to consider our impact on the great creatures of this planet.”

Other notable images from this year’s contest include a shark showing off its toothy grin, a spectacular lionfish out for a swim, and a whale opening its mouth wide for a sardine snack.

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Landslides can be truly devastating, killing people and animals that can’t get out of the way in time and washing away property. Landslides generally occur during earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or massive rainfall that make a sloped section of land like a cliff unstable. Now, a team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) have developed a new method that could be used to remotely detect large landslides within minutes and tell if the slide is a tsunami hazard. Their method is described in a study published February 9 in the journal The Seismic Record.

[Related: California wildfires may give way to massive mudslides.]

Monitoring Alaska’s glacial fjords for danger

The study cites a 2015 landslide that sent 100 million cubic yards of rock into Alaska’s Taan Fjord. It generated a tsunami that stripped vegetation as high as 620 feet above the waterline. 

In response, the team helped develop a prototype system capable of real-time detection that has been in place since August 2023 around the Barry Arm section of Prince William Sound. The system uses data from seismic stations already in Alaska’s monitoring network.

State and federal disaster agencies worry that a landslide and tsunami could occur at Barry Arm. The Barry Glacier has significantly retreated and left behind an unsupported fjord wall, or the slope of rock or ice rising up from the water to the top of the landmass. Over the past several years, the wall has slumped about 650 feet. Additional analysis of seismic station data on the region revealed that three landslides occurred in 2020 and 2021.

“The warming climate is causing glaciers to retreat, leaving behind valleys whose mountainsides and hillsides have lost their support,” UAF research seismologist Ezgi Karasözen said in a statement. “This is important, especially in regions like southern coastal Alaska, because huge masses of land can and do spill into water and cause tsunamis.”

According to the study, this instability has disaster agencies concerned that a catastrophic failure of the glacier wall could create a tsunami of waves several feet high that reach nearby communities in only 20 minutes.

Looking for long-period waves

Scientists monitor seismic activity that shows up in jagged waves on seismographs. When a landslide begins, it generally registers on seismic sensors as short-period waves. As the slide accelerates, identifiable long-period waves show up. Landslides eventually produce more of these long-period waves than other sources of energy like earthquakes. Most earthquake ruptures only last a few seconds, while landslides can go for a minute or more.

The detection method in the study involves quickly identifying a landslide’s long-period waves  among seismic data that is crowded with short-period waves. Since glaciers can create hundreds of daily seismic events that produce waves, coastal fjords like Barry Arm create a challenge for landslide detection. Far away seismic stations also do not allow for real-time assessment, since it takes time for the seismic waves to reach those stations. 

“With an earthquake, there are instruments that measure ocean wave heights, and tsunami warning centers are on alert after an earthquake,” Karasözen said. “But landslides aren’t systematically monitored in Alaska or elsewhere in the world. If a landslide-triggered tsunami were to happen, we wouldn’t know. That’s a major concern.”

A landslide algorithm and five-minute warnings

To create the new monitoring method, the team developed an algorithm that continually scans seismic data to detect a landslide’s long-period wave signature. If the system finds a match, it will estimate the slide’s location and volume. In areas that are well monitored, the location of the landslide can be estimated to within a few miles. 

[Related: New AI-based tsunami warning software could help save lives.]

The team analyzed data of the three recent Barry Glacier landslides and six additional landslides to build the algorithm. The end goal is to build a larger system to alert tsunami and seismology agency personnel, but more work must be done to create this system. 

While additional researchers have shown that landslide seismograms can be used to estimate location and volume, those efforts usually were typically unique to a specific region, required constant updates, and were not designed to be used in real-time.

“The potential for real-time monitoring of large landslides is one important component of the interagency effort underway to address Alaska’s landslide challenge,” Michael West, study co-author and director of the Alaska Earthquake Center at UAF’s Geophysical Institute, said in a statement.

According to the team, this new method of determining a landslide’s location, volume, and potential is quick enough to support the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s major goal of issuing a tsunami warning within five minutes of a landslide.

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Rediscovering a lost species is exciting, and important for boosting conservation efforts. However, it is not for the faint of heart. An international team of scientists traversed 75 miles of steep mountain terrain to capture the first recorded photos of a bird once considered lost. The yellow-crested helmetshrike (Prionops alberti) was listed as a ‘lost bird’ by the American Bird Conservancy because it hadn’t been seen by scientists in almost 20 years. 

[Related: These unusual plants had disappeared—until citizen scientists helped hunt them down.]

That did not deter a group of scientists from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). They embarked on a six-week expedition to the Itombwe Massif mountain range in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo alongside a group of Congolese researchers from the Centre de Recherche en Sciences Naturelles. The team trekked by foot for over 75 miles to survey all of the birds, amphibians, and reptiles they found along the way.

While exploring the cloud forests on the slopes of a mountain, the team stumbled upon the helmetshrike, with its bright yellow “helmet” and black plumage. They primarily feed on insects and other small prey and forage in tight groups. The birds were observed in very noisy groups in the forest’s midstory–the area between the shortest and tallest trees, between the top canopy and shrub layer. 

[Related: Why small, scary, and ‘non-charismatic’ lost species are harder to rediscover.]

“It was a mind-blowing experience to come across these birds,” UTEP ornithologist Michael Harvey said in a statement. “We knew they might be possible here, but I was not prepared for how spectacular and unique they would appear in life.”

The yellow-crested helmetshrike is endemic to the western slopes of the Albertine Rift of Central Africa. About 18 birds in total were found at three sites during the expedition. The photos of the helmetshrikes have been reviewed and confirmed by Cameron Rutt, who leads the American Bird Conservancy’s Lost Birds project. 

The December 2023 to January 2024 expedition also led to the rediscovery of the red-bellied squeaker frog (Arthroleptis hematogaster), which had not been documented by scientists in this region since the 1950s. The frog rediscovery was confirmed by biologist David Blackburn from the University of Florida’s Museum of Natural History.

While the photos are exciting, the team remains concerned for the future of the recently rediscovered frog and bird species. The IUCN Red List suggests that the helmetshrikes may lose over 90 percent of its range due to climate change by 2080. Amphibians like the red-bellied squeaker frog are also the most threatened class of invertebrates due to climate change. 

“Mining and logging as well as the clearing of forests for agriculture are making inroads deep into the forests of the Itombwe range,” Harvey said. “We are in discussions with other researchers and conservation organizations to further efforts to protect the region’s forests and the helmetshrike. Right now is a golden opportunity to protect these tropical forests, so that we don’t lose species like the helmetshrike before they are known and studied.”

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Baleen whales, including today’s blue, humpback, and fin whales rely on sounds to live in their watery world. Their songs must be able travel far in the murky, dark ocean so that they can find their kin and migrate hundreds of thousands of miles. In the more than 50 years that scientists have been studying whale song, it’s remained unclear what physical structures baleen whales use to make noise until now. A  study published February 21 in the journal Nature finds that baleen whales evolved unique parts in their larynx that create their complex vocalizations.

[Related: The planet’s first filter feeder could be this extinct marine reptile.]

“Whales are absolutely amazing creatures, they are the biggest animals to have ever lived. They’re way bigger than the largest dinosaurs, they can dive deep, and are very social,” Coen Elemans, study co-author and a voice scientist at the University of Southern Denmark, tells PopSci. “Because it is so difficult to find another animal in a huge ocean, many of these behaviors are guided by sound. Thus understanding how they make sound is crucial to understand the biology of whales in general.”

Toothed whales vs. baleen whales

Whales fall into two main groups–toothed whales (Odontocetes) and baleen whales (Mysticetes). Toothed whales include, orcas, sperm whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Many of these species have visible teeth that they use to crush their prey.

Baleen–or whalebone–is a hard substance made up of keratin. It grows from the whale’s upper jaw in plates with bristle-like fringes. It works like a sieve to filter out the small fish or zooplankton that it eats. 

“Baleen whales make sound with their larynx and toothed whales in their nose,” explains Elemans. “Both use the same mechanism of vibrating tissues just like human vocal folds, but with completely new structures.”

Evolving new vocal structures

In the study, the team examined three stranded whales. Each specimen was from different baleen species–sei, common minke, and humpback whale. Whales that strand themselves on  the beach can provide researchers with an opportunity to study their anatomy closer. After the larynx of each whale species was extracted, the team built a computational model of the entire whale larynx in the lab. The model included accurate 3D shapes of the muscles surrounding the larynx, which made it possible to simulate how the sound frequency is controlled by muscle movement.

They found that baleen whales evolved to produce sound with the  vibrations of specific internal structures in the larynx, that toothed whales do not have. These specialized structures in baleen whales allow for sound to be produced and air recycled, while preventing the whales from inhaling water. 

While both types of whales can still produce sound with their larynx, baleen whales have novel structures that do this. They use cartilages called the arytenoids that are also found in the human larynx. The arytenoids change the position of human vocal folds. In baleen whales, they appear as  large, long cylinders at the base of a U-shaped rigid structure that covers the full length of the larynx, instead of small cartilage. This helps keep their airway open when moving large amounts of air through their massive bodies and not choke. 

“The toothed and baleen whales evolved from land mammals that had a larynx serving two functions: protecting the airways and sound production,” Tecumseh Fitch, a study co-author and  biologist at the University of Vienna in Austria, said in a statement. “However, their transition to aquatic life placed new and strict demands on the larynx to prevent choking underwater.”

Turn it down

While the study showed how baleen whales produce low frequency vocalizations for the first time, thesound production that they have honed over millions of years of evolution is becoming threatened in an increasingly noisy ocean. 

“They can’t make sound very deep and most species can’t make high frequencies,” says Elemans. “This limits the range of their communication. On top of that, these depths and frequencies overlap with human made noise in the oceans, such as boat traffic, and thus the whales cannot escape this noise by singing for example higher.”

[Related: Is it loud in the ocean?]

The authors cite the flurry of conservation and political activity in the wake of the first acoustic recordings of humpback whale song in 1970. Roger and Katy Payne’s album Songs of the Humpback Whale was considered so important that selections from it were included on a record aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft, to give any extraterrestrials who may find the spacecraft an idea of what life on Earth is like. The oceans have only gotten noisier since the 1970s, and similar conservation efforts are needed to reduce noise. 

“We need strict regulations for such noise, because these whales are dependent on sound for communication,” Elemans said in a statement. “Now we show that despite their amazing physiology they literally cannot escape the noise humans make in the oceans.”

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From São Paulo to Macaé, Brazil’s southern coast is flush with fishing vessels. As many as 3,700 bottom trawlers ply the region in search of fish and shrimp. All too often, however, hidden away at the bottom of bulging nets, fishers find Patagonian seahorses, a protected species that lives almost nowhere else.

Researchers have long suspected that southern Brazil is a hotbed for seahorse bycatch, and in a new study, scientists calculate the full size of the problem.

Led by Rosana Silveira, a seahorse researcher with Brazil’s nongovernmental Hippocampus Institute, scientists monitored the catches from five fishing boats between 2016 and 2018. On average, each of these boats pulled up six seahorses every day.

Six seahorses a day doesn’t sound like much, says Sarah Foster, a seahorse expert at the University of British Columbia who wasn’t involved in the study. But extrapolating from five boats to the thousands that make up Brazil’s fleet, she says, yields a much more striking toll—roughly 2.3 million seahorses every year. Fishers are then selling these incidentally caught seahorses, which are sometimes injured or dead, on the black market.

The vast majority of the global seahorse trade winds up dried and used for traditional Chinese medicine, says Foster, and a fraction goes to the aquarium trade. The Brazilian bycatch, however, mostly stays in the country, Silveira says. There, it feeds a clandestine market for curios, folk remedies, and talismans used in Afro-Brazilian religions.

But Brazil’s estimated take of 2.3 million seahorses makes the country a major seahorse supplier, says Silveira. It’s not too far behind the countries with the highest catch rates: Thailand with 29 million, Vietnam with 16.7 million, and India with 14 million.

Brazil’s market for seahorses is nothing new. Before the government protected seahorses in 2014, the fish were easily found in local markets. “Everyone openly sold dried seahorses that were displayed in bowls or hung in plastic bags,” Silveira says. Since protections went into effect in 2014, though, sales have become more covert. The animals are no longer on display. But if you insist to a market vendor that you need a dried seahorse treatment, “the fish will appear,” Silveira adds.

Silveira can’t say much about how these seahorses are moving around Brazil—researchers may attempt to map trade routes in a future study. Given the sheer number of seahorses being caught, Silveira says the black market is likely much larger and more secretive than she thought.

The bycatch problem is a threat to Brazil’s seahorses. And to really fix the situation, Foster says conservation efforts should focus on curtailing bottom trawling rather than cracking down on illegal trade.

“Even if the seahorses weren’t being consumed, they would still be getting caught in fishing gear and dying,” Foster says. “Anywhere there are seahorses and there is bottom trawling, there’s a problem.”

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

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Almost half of the migratory species on Earth monitored by the United Nations are declining and more than one-fifth are currently threatened with extinction. These stark numbers come from the first State of the World’s Migratory Species report released by the UN’s Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) on February 12.

[Related: These new interactive maps reveal the incredible global journeys of migrating birds.]

Billions of animals including sea turtles, wildebeest, fruit bats, and pelicans make annual migratory journeys by water, land, and air. Some travel thousands of miles to eat and reproduce, while crossing national boundaries and continents. They provide a vital role in the ecosystem, by pollinating plants, being part of the food web, transporting nutrients, and helping store excess carbon. 

Why are migratory species in trouble?

The report focuses on 1,189 specific animal species that have been recognized by CMS as in need of international protection. About 22 percent including are threatened with extinction and that risk is growing worldwide. Nearly every CMS-listed species of fish–including migratory sharks, rays, and sturgeon–are facing a high risk of extinction. Their populations have declined by 90 percent since the 1970s.

Overexploitation and habitat loss from human activity are cited as the two biggest threats to migratory species. Three out of four species are impacted by habitat loss and further degradation and fragmentation of the regions that they live in. About seven out of 10 species are impacted by overexploitation–activities like hunting and poaching. Invasive species, pollution, and climate change are also impacting migratory species.

Some of the migratory species listed under CMS are improving. About 14 listed species including the blue whale, humpback whale, white-tailed sea eagle, and black-faced spoonbill have improved their conservation status. However, 70 migratory species have become more endangered over the past three decades. These include the wild camel, Egyptian vulture, and steppe eagle. 

“Today’s report clearly shows us that unsustainable human activities are jeopardizing the future of migratory species–creatures who not only act as indicators of environmental change but play an integral role in maintaining the function and resilience of our planet’s complex ecosystems,” UN Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Andersen said in a statement. 

An international solution

The report was released at the beginning of a world summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, to discuss better ways to protect the world’s migratory species. The species listed are at risk of extinction across most or all of their range, so they need a coordinated international collaboration to boost their protection. 

[Related: We don’t have a full picture of the planet’s shrinking biodiversity. Here’s why.]

The report was prepared for CMS by conservation scientists at the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre. According to the UN, it uses robust data sets and includes expert contributions from institutions including BirdLife International and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

“Migratory species rely on a variety of specific habitats at different times in their lifecycles. They regularly travel, sometimes thousands of miles, to reach these places,” CMS Executive Secretary Amy Fraenkel said in a statement. “They face enormous challenges and threats along the way, as well as their destinations where they breed or feed. When species cross national borders, their survival depends on the efforts of all countries in which they are found.”

The report recommends that human infrastructure near the areas that migratory species use to travel should be minimized. The team also stressed more work to understand the landscape, seascape, and flyways that are critical to migratory species to boost conservation efforts. 

“The reason why species are covered by the convention is because they are in trouble – it is not surprising to find that some of them are endangered,” Fraenkel told The Guardian. “The problem is the trend: 44 percent of listed species are in decline and that increasing extinction risk is something that applies globally to migratory species.”

Participants of this five day UN meeting plan to evaluate proposals for new conservation methods and whether or not to formally list new species of concern. According to the Associated Press, eight governments from South America are expected to jointly propose adding two species of declining Amazon catfish to the list of migratory species of concern. Governments pledged to protect 30 percent of Earth’s land and water resources during the 2022 UN Biodiversity Conference.

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Bieito Fernández Castro wasn’t expecting to find a turbulent hotbed of anchovy sex.

Commissioned by the Spanish government to investigate the conditions behind algae blooms, which kill mussels, Castro and his team were studying a peaceful spot in a bay in northwestern Spain. In the absence of strong winds or waves, toxic algae blooms occur more frequently here compared with surrounding areas, to the detriment of the resident mussels—and mussel farmers. But after two weeks of monitoring the apparently tranquil water with sensors that measure small shifts in temperature and velocity, Castro and his colleagues found that the bay’s calm surface belied what was happening below.

“Every night and without any apparent reason, we were seeing very, very high levels of turbulence,” says Castro, a physical oceanographer at England’s University of Southampton. Castro and his colleagues eventually traced the source of all this mixing: the frothing free-for-all of an anchovy orgy.

Most animals mate, but few do so with such frequency, and with so many bodies packed so closely together, as anchovies. As Castro and his colleagues’ data shows, these fornicating fish churn the water as much as a major storm.

Anchovies are among the ocean’s more amorous residents. The fish move in large aggregations of millions or more, and a female anchovy can release between 20,000 and 30,000 eggs each year, which males promptly fertilize like aquatic crop dusters.

All that “frantic activity,” as Castro calls it, causes quite a stir. And it’s something other sea dwellers might actually benefit from.

Turbulence is crucial for mixing heat and nutrients throughout the ocean. Previous research largely shows that the turbulence animals cause living their lives isn’t enough to substantially mix the layers of the ocean’s water column. But Castro’s study—which was published in 2022 and won a 2023 Ig Nobel Prize for humorous, thought-provoking scientific achievement—shows that within ocean layers, anchovy spawning causes significant, if subtle, swings in temperature. This finding suggests that in shallower water, the ruckus produced by plentiful piscine participants procreating all at once might be more powerful and more important for ocean mixing than previously thought.

In general, winds, tides, and forceful currents are the main things that stir and mix the ocean. Kirstin Schulz, a physical oceanographer at the University of Texas at Austin who studies small-scale mixing and wasn’t involved in Castro’s research, says scientists don’t typically consider animal movement a major cause of mixing in the ocean as a whole. However, Schulz says researchers have a lot to learn about how tiny turbulent motions mix ocean layers of different densities, salinities, and chemical makeups in shallow bays and other waterbodies. “This study shows that it definitely happens and can be of importance in a more local setting,” she says.

It’s even possible, Castro says, that his study actually underrepresents the effects of anchovy sex. Local fishermen told him the anchovy aggregation he studied was much smaller than similar swarms spotted farther offshore. In places like La Jolla, California, researchers have seen anchovy aggregations of between 10 million and one billion fish—schools so vast and dense they look like an oil spill cutting through clear water. Other schooling species, such as sardines and herring, swim in groups of similar sizes. But scientists have very little data on whether these species produce similarly titillating turbulence.

Curtis Deutsch, an oceanographer at Princeton University in New Jersey who studies oxygen and nutrient cycling and wasn’t involved in the study, says that to get the full picture of the extent to which fish and other marine life might be mixing the sea, scientists will need to study their effects on the deep ocean as well as surface waters. Water in the deep ocean is generally calmer than that at the surface, as it’s not stirred by wind or waves. Down there, Deutsch says, biological activity would be disproportionately important for ocean mixing. Unfortunately, he adds, that’s where “a lot of schooling behavior goes undetected.”

While much more research is needed to fully understand ocean mixing and the role marine animals might play in the process, Castro’s accidental anchovy discovery shows there’s more to the sultry lives of sea creatures than we surface dwellers might think.

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

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NASA’s PACE satellite successfully launched into orbit at 1:33 a.m. EST on February 8. The climate satellite launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

[Related: Scientists say the ocean is changing color—and it’s probably our fault.]

The new Plankton, Aerosol, Climate, ocean Ecosystem satellite will study ocean health, air quality, the atmosphere, and the effects of climate change from about 420 miles above the Earth. While NASA already has over 24 Earth-observing satellites and instruments in orbit, this new one should give scientists better insight into how particles in the atmosphere like pollutants and volcanic ash interact with algae and plankton. 

“It’s going to teach us about the oceans in the same way that Webb is teaching us about the cosmos,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division, Science Mission Directorate, during a pre-launch briefing on February 4th. St. Germain is referencing the James Webb Space Telescope, which has been unveiling mysteries of the deep cosmos for almost two years. 

What’s on board

PACE will scan the Earth every day using two science instruments, while a third device will take monthly measurements.  

According to NASA, the hyperspectral ocean color instrument will help researchers measure the world’s oceans and other bodies of water across a spectrum of ultraviolet (UV), visible, and near-infrared light. PACE will be able to detect 200 colors, compared to the seven or eight colors that current satellites can pick up. Seeing such a wide spectrum of color will allow researchers to track how phytoplankton is distributed around the globe. 

Two polarimeter instruments are also onboard–Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter #2 and Spectro-polarimeter for Planetary Exploration. Both will detect how sunlight interacts with particles in the atmosphere. This will give sciencents new insight into atmospheric aerosols and cloud properties, and air quality at local, regional, and global scales.

“Observations and scientific research from PACE will profoundly advance our knowledge of the ocean’s role in the climate cycle,” St. Germain said in a statement following the launch. “The value of PACE data skyrockets when we combine it with data and science from our Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission–ushering in a new era of ocean science. As an open-source science mission with early adopters ready to use its research and data, PACE will accelerate our understanding of the Earth system and help NASA deliver actionable science, data, and practical applications to help our coastal communities and industries address rapidly evolving challenges.”

Why study phytoplankton from space

Our planet’s oceans are responding to climate change in several different ways. Sea levels are rising as polar ice melts. Marine heat waves are killing sea life and fueling stronger storms. The ocean is even getting more green and shifts in ocean color is an indication that ecosystems may also be changing. A July 2023 study found that the changes and blue-green fluctuations to the ocean’s hue over the last two decades cannot be explained by natural year-to-year variability alone. These changes are present in over 56 percent of the planet’s oceans. The study also found that tropical oceans near the Earth’s equator have become steadily greener overtime.

[Related: The epic journey of dust in the wind often ends with happy plankton.]

Following tiny phytoplankton can help monitor all of these changes. These microscopic marine algae play a major role in the global carbon cycle. Phytoplankton absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into cellular material. It drives the larger aquatic and global ecosystem by providing food for bigger organisms.

PACE will provide the first measurements of phytoplankton community composition around the world. “This will significantly improve our ability to understand Earth’s changing marine ecosystems, manage natural resources such as fisheries and identify harmful algal blooms,” wrote NASA.

A mission 20 years in the making

In addition to two scrubbed launch attempts earlier this week, PACE has powered through other adversity on its way into orbit. The Trump Administration tried to cancel the mission four times in separate budget proposals. However, the funds were already allocated by Congress which saved it.

It has also had delays and cost overruns. NASA capped the mission’s total price tag at $805 million in 2014, with a launch initially scheduled for 2022. By the 2024 launch, the cost ballooned to $948 million.

“After 20 years of thinking about this mission, it’s exhilarating to watch it finally realized and to witness its launch. I couldn’t be prouder or more appreciative of our PACE team,” Jeremy Werdell, PACE project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. “The opportunities PACE will offer are so exciting, and we’re going to be able to use these incredible technologies in ways we haven’t yet anticipated. It’s truly a mission of discovery.”

Scientists expect to start getting the first data from PACE in a month or two. 

The post NASA’s PACE satellite takes off to monitor phytoplankton—from space appeared first on Popular Science.

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A Japanese and Brazilian team of scientists found a funky new jellyfish with a distinguishing mark. The St. George’s cross medusa (Santjordia pagesi or S. pagesi) is a new medusa jellyfish species that was found about 2,664 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean. It lives in a deep-sea volcanic structure called the Sumisu Caldera. This hot, hydrothermally active caldera is about six miles across and is located off the coast of Japan’s Ogasawara Islands, about 285 miles south of the capital city of Tokyo. The findings are described in a study published in November the journal Zootaxa.

[Related: Even without brains, jellyfish learn from their mistakes.]

Protecting its snacks–with a shield and 240 tentacles

The St. George’s Cross medusa is considered fairly large for a jellyfish, at about four inches wide and three inches long. It also boasts roughly 240 tentacles. It gets its name from a cross shape on its body when viewed from above that resembles the red Cross of St. George on the English flag. 

It is a type of jellyfish called a medusa (or the plural form, medusae), which are free-swimming jellyfish that are shaped like an umbrella and have a reduced stalk. 

“The species is very different from all the deep-sea medusae discovered to date. It’s relatively small, whereas others in this kind of environment are much larger. The bright red coloring of its stomach probably has to do with capturing food,” André Morandini, a study co-author and biologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, said in a statement. 

Like all jellyfish, S. pagesi is transparent. It also eats other bioluminescent organisms in the deep sea that give off light. The team believes that its bright red stomach acts like a shield to hide its prey. This way, other organisms can’t see its meal after it has swallowed it. 

A rare find

While new species are discovered and described all the time, this one was particularly rare. It was so difficult for the team to collect, that the findings are based on one single specimen. However, the team reportedly saw another S. pagesi nearby and expect future surveys to show more members of the group.

The specimen in the study was captured back in 2002 by the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Hyperdolphin. The Sumisu Caldera can only be accessed through an ROV since it is so deep . Scientists didn’t see any other specimens until 2020. An ROV filmed, but didn’t collect, another jellyfish of the same species.

[Related: These fingernail-sized jellyfish can regenerate tentacles—but how?]

“We opted to publish the description and call attention to the species that are present at the site, which has a substrate rich in minerals and the potential to be commercially developed. Unfortunately, research can’t be conducted in such places without partners who have interests of this kind,” Morandini said.

‘Arsenal of venoms’

S. pagesi  belongs to a new subfamily named Santjordiinae. It has small sensory structures called rhopalia on underneath and on the edges of its umbrella, which makes it unique among jellyfish in the order Semaeostomeae. This is the order that more common species like moon jellyfish belong to. The team believes it could eventually fit within Semaeostomeae when they can collect more species. For now, it remains in Ulmaridae, the broader jellyfish family.

Since it is so different among jellyfish, the authors believe that it potentially has an “arsenal of venoms” that are unlike those previously discovered in jellyfish. The Indo-Pacific box jellyfish releases a venom that makes the heart contract and Australian box jellyfish can release this venom from thick tentacles that grow up to 10 feet long. 

“Who knows? Maybe it holds secrets more valuable than all the mineral wealth that could be extracted from that place. All this with the advantage of keeping the species and the site intact,” said Morandini.

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An international team of scientists believe they have finally found the elusive answer to the question of why moths are drawn to light. The artificial light appears to trap moths and other flying insects in a wonky flight pattern. The light makes them lose their sense of up and down, since they are used to following light in the night sky instead of on the ground. The moths aren’t necessarily attracted to the light, but are more likely trapped in its glow. The findings are described in a study published January 30 in the journal Nature Connections.

[Related: Light pollution is messing with coral reproduction.]

Millions of years of evolution

Moths and butterflies have called Earth home for at least 200 million years. Through that time, 

moths and other insects that fly at night may have evolved to tilt their heads back towards whatever direction is brightest. This light source was originally the stars and moonlight in the sky and not on the ground. This ensured that the bugs knew which way was up and kept them flying level. 

When artificial light sources began to fill up the Earth, the moths found themselves tilting their backs at lamps in the street or fires. This caused them to fly in endless loops around the streetlamp, as they were trapped by instincts learned through millions of years of evolution.  

“This has been a prehistorical question. In the earliest writings, people were noticing this around fire,” study co-author and Florida International University biologist Jamie Theobald said in a statement. “It turns out all our speculations about why it happens have been wrong, so this is definitely the coolest project I’ve been part of.”

Monitoring flight paths

In the study, a team of international researchers in the Costa Rican cloud forest used high resolution and high-speed infrared video recordings to capture insect flight paths around artificial lights. They collected over 477 videos spanning more than 11 insect orders. This technology was able to capture the insects’ fast and frenzied orbits by the lights and was used to reconstruct points of their flight paths in three dimensions. The team noticed that moths and dragonflies turned their backs to artificial lights, which appeared to drastically change their flight paths. The insects may have thought that the lights were a source of light in the sky and not on the ground.

“If the light’s above them, they might start orbiting it, but if it’s behind them, they start tilting backwards and that can cause them to climb up and up until they stall,” study co-author and Imperial College London entomologist Sam Fabian told The Guardian. “More dramatic is when they fly directly over a light. They flip themselves upside down and that can lead to crashes. It really suggests that the moth is confused as to which way is up.”

The research has some entomologists buzzing, since it provides a potential answer to a phenomenon in nature that is millions of years old.

Conservation concerns

This study is the first known documentation of this behavior in nocturnal insects and provides a new possible explanation of why lights seem to attract moths. While it appears to confirm that light is disruptive, it also gives new insights into a conservation concern. Light pollution is a major reason behind recent declines in insect populations. Moths and other insects can become trapped in the lights and become easy prey for bats. The fake light can also make moths believe that it is daytime and signal that it is time to sleep and not eat.

[Related: City lights could trigger a baby boom for some moths and butterflies.]

The study also suggests light direction matters when designing and installing exterior lights. According to the team, the worst direction is an upward facing or bare bulb. Shrouding or shielding a lightbulb could help offset the negative impacts.

Scientists are also beginning to think about how light color impacts flying nocturnal insects. The unexplained mystery of how these insects are initially attracted to light over great distances also still remains. 

“I’d been told before you can’t ask why questions like this one, that there was no point,” Yash Sondhi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History and study co-author, said in a statement. “But in being persistent and finding the right people, we came up with an answer none of us really thought of, but that’s so important to increasing awareness about how light impacts insect populations and informing changes that can help them out.”

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Lions, elephants, zebras, buffalo, ants, and trees are all locked in an intricate ecological web in one Kenyan nature preserve. But that web is unraveling as a small invader disrupts the natural balance of things, according to a study published January 24 in the journal Science.

The spread of an invasive insect across the savannah habitat of Ol Pejeta Conservancy has triggered a domino effect. The fallout leaves lions less able to hunt zebras–their primary prey– and has prompted the big cats to pursue larger and potentially more dangerous buffalo, says Todd Palmer, one of the study authors and a biology professor at the University of Florida. Other major ecosystem shifts, like loss of bird habitat and declining soil health, are likely also occurring. 

The new research builds on past work to demonstrate just how delicate and complex the savannah ecosystem is. More broadly, it shows how important mutualisms (mutually beneficial relationships between species) can be in habitats around the world. When the connections between organisms are disrupted, it can have serious conservation consequences.

A changing landscape 

It all starts with a well-documented symbiosis between whistling-thorn acacia trees, which are the most common woody plant in Ol Pejeta, and native acacia ants. The trees provide the ants with habitat and nectar to eat. In return, the ants protect the trees from would-be megaherbivores, like elephants, with their nasty bites. This relationship is considered a foundational one: a mutualism that shapes the landscape by allowing acacia trees to thrive amid many large plant-hungry animals– but it’s in peril.

Big-headed ants, an aggressive and predatory invasive species, are destabilizing that foundation by displacing the native acacia ants. When big-headed ants come to an acacia ant nest, they wreak havoc–killing and eliminating their native competition. And unlike their native counterparts, big-headed ants do nothing to defend acacias. As a result, elephants and other herbivores more easily graze on the trees, leaving few trunks left in areas colonized by the big-headed ants. A savannah invaded by big-headed ants is a much more open habitat, largely devoid of brush and woodland. 

Palmer and his co-researchers have observed and studied this transition over the past two decades as the invasive ants have spread. It’s led the scientists to wonder how other animals are being impacted by the landscape change. In this most recent study, they focus on the predator/prey dynamic between lions and zebras. 

Lions are ambush predators and previous research suggests that they use tree cover to help them hide and surprise their prey. Zebras in Ol Pejeta are skittish and prefer to spend time in open, high-visibility areas where possible. As the ant invasion leaves the Kenyan savannah more open, lions seem to be losing out on opportunities to hunt and kill zebras, according to the study findings. Additionally, the big cats seem to be supplementing their diet with buffalo. 

“This little invasive ant has really rearranged the species interactions,” in Ol Pejeta, Palmer says. “It has dramatically influenced the most iconic African predator, the lion, and its primary prey species.”

Experiments and observation 

To come to that conclusion, the research team collected years of observations and conducted long-term experiments in the nature preserve. First, to confirm that big-headed ant invasions lead to more grazing by elephants and fewer acacia trees, they monitored three sets of four big experimental plots. Half the plots were in areas where big-headed ants had invaded and half were in parts of the preserve where the ants hadn’t yet arrived. In half the plots, they used electric fencing to keep out megaherbivores like elephants and giraffes. After three years, they assessed their plots and found, among the unfenced plots, visibility was 2.67 times higher where big-headed ants were present. There was no significant difference between visibility in the fenced plots, regardless of whether or not the invasive ants were present, signaling herbivory was the difference-maker.

Then, Palmer and his colleagues tracked six prides of lions with GPS collars. They used this data to keep tabs on zebra kills over a several month period. In total, the researchers documented 55 different instances where lions killed zebras within the preserve. Through a nested path analysis, which is a sort of statistical Occam’s razor, the scientists found that zebra kills were 2.87 times more common in areas free of big-headed ants than in invaded areas.

Over the study period, the researchers didn’t find any increase in zebra density. (Palmer explains that zebra populations are more restricted by food availability than by predation.) More surprisingly, the researchers also didn’t note a drop in the lion population. To the scientists, the stable lion numbers indicated the predators were relying on alternative prey. And, in fact, additional data collected by land managers and surveyors at Ol Pejeta supports this. From 2003 to 2020, zebras became a smaller proportion of observed lion kills, going from 67 percent to 42 percent. Buffalo, on the other hand, went from zero percent of recorded lion kills in 2003 to 42 percent of all kills in 2020. 

All in all, the researchers have “meticulously pieced together the causes and consequences,” of an invasive insect in central Kenya, writes Kaitlyn Gaynor, an ecology professor at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study, in an accompanying commentary article. As Gaynor describes the new study, it’s thorough and revealing research into a complex system.

There are, however, some important limits to the findings, says Palmer. They were able to show associations and suggest likely explanations, but much of their research doesn’t conclusively prove any pattern, he notes. For instance, the data on the rise in buffalo kills is only correlational–the scientists can’t say for certain that it’s being caused by the invasive ants. And why buffalo have become the new prey of choice isn’t yet clear. Palmer hypothesizes that Buffalo are less vigilant than zebras, and so might be spending more time in less open areas of the savannah, but follow-up research is needed to further explore this theory and to assess if the buffalo population is changing amid the new pressure of lion predation. Yet still, the work has big implications for the ecosystem’s future. 

An uncertain future

So far, the lion population has remained stable, but Palmer says that could change moving forward. Buffalo are larger and risky prey for lions to take on. It’s possible that more lions will incur hunting injuries by changing up their prey strategy. Hunting buffalo, which usually involves multiple lions working together, also likely takes more energy than hunting zebras. In the long term, that increased energy cost could add up to fewer cubs and smaller numbers. Plus, tree cover continues to decline and all of the lions’ wooded hiding places vanish, buffalo, too, will become harder to hunt. 

Many other species are also at risk amid the ant invasion. Weaver birds that nest in the canopy of acacia trees lose habitat, says Palmer. Butterflies that associate with the acacia ants could disappear. Critically endangered black rhinos that rely on the acacia trees for food might be further imperiled. Carbon storage and soil health may decline as more trees die–whistling-thorn trees are legumes that add nitrogen to the soil. Without them, the savannah grasses could also suffer. At the moment, there’s no clear strategy for controlling the big-headed ants, he says. 

In his years studying this system, Palmer says he’s seen parts of the landscape totally transform. “It’s kind of depressing,” he says–but it’s also an important lesson in biological complexity that could help reframe and refocus conservation efforts. “When most people think about conservation, they think about conserving species–saving the elephants or the lions or the zebras. We think a lot less often about the integrity of species interaction,” he explains. Perhaps it’s time to put more work into understanding and preserving the connections between organisms instead of just individual animals, he suggests. A lion isn’t just a lion, it’s part of a biological fabric. To keep that living cloth intact, every thread plays a role, even the humble ant. 

The health of an ecosystem doesn’t just come down to who eats who, but also what a habitat looks like and where there are and aren’t shady hiding spots. As a result, the link between the smallest insect and the mightiest predator is both stronger and more tenuous than you might expect.

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Sea otters are more than just photogenic fluff balls known for floating on their backs with buoyant fur and eating about 25 percent of their body weight in one day. They are also potentially strengthening the health of California’s kelp forests. A study published January 18 in the journal PLOS Climate found that the sea otter population is significant in regions where kelp forest canopy has increased over more than a century. The study suggests that sea otter populations kept the kelp forests more resilient. This research reinforces why conservation and recovery of the threatened southern sea otter is important and highlights some solutions to restoring California’s famed kelp forests.   

[Related: These otters learn how to snag snacks by watching their friends.]

Why this big seaweed is a big deal

Kelp is a large, brown algae that lives in relatively shallow waters close to shore. They grow in large groups that resemble forests on land. These kelp forests are important because they contain a greater variety and higher diversity of plants and animals than most of almost any other community in the world’s oceans. Fish, sea birds, seals, small marine invertebrates, and more use the thick blades of kelp as a safe shelter for their young and even take shelter in them during storms. They also provide a barrier against coastal erosion for the mainland. In the Western Pacific Ocean, Kelp forests predominantly grow from Alaska and Canada south to the waters of Baja California, Mexico. 

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), they also provide humans with a habitat for commercially important fishery species including kelp bass and black rockfish. 

Some of the primary threats to kelp forests include runoff from chemicals and sewage on land, rising ocean temperatures, overharvesting, and invasive species. 

More sea otters, more kelp

The study looked at changes to the kelp canopy from 1910 to 2016. During this time period, the central coast of California was the only region to see a significant increase in kelp forest canopy. This is also the only region in the state that had a population of southern sea otters. Coveted for their warm fur, the mammals were nearly hunted to the extinction during the 19th Century. 

Over the 100-year period, the southern sea otter’s favorable impact on kelp forests along the central coast almost completely compensated for the kelp losses along both southern and northern California.

“Our study showed that kelp forests are more extensive and resilient to climate change where sea otters have reoccupied the California coastline during the last century. Where sea otters are absent, kelp forests have declined dramatically. In fact, we found sea otter population density as the strongest predictor of change in kelp canopy coverage across this hundred-year span,” study co-author and Monterey Bay Aquarium Sea Otter Program research biologist Teri Nicholson said in a statement. 

The study also noted similar trends in the Channel Islands, with kelp canopy increasing where sea otters were present and a similar assessment in Alaska also showed that sea otters help maintain kelp forests. The otters are likely an important carnivore in degraded ecosystems where there were previous predator-prey imbalances. They can eat sea urchins and other organisms that could overpopulate the ecosystem and hurt the kelp.

[Related: Why seaweed farming could be the next big thing in sustainability.]

The team analyzed historical surveys of kelp forests dating back to the early 1900s to generate estimates of kelp canopy extent, biomass, and carbon storage. Their method also corrected for year-to-year variation and differences in surveying methods. Looking at these records allowed the team to study California’s kelp forest trends over a longer time period. These records went back more than 60 years before aerial and satellite imagery was available for studying kelp canopies. They took these historical estimates and compared them to contemporary datasets and used computer models to assess what has been driving changes over the last century.

“The use of historical maps provided an important opportunity to help us examine long-term kelp forest trends,” Monterey Bay Aquarium Sea Otter Program Manager Jess Fujii said in a statement. “This broader view is important for understanding trends related to climate change, and developing effective science-based conservation strategies.”

The study found that statewide, there was only a six percent decline in kelp canopy from 1910 to 2016. However, the regional changes were more sizable. In northern regions, it decreased by 63 percent. The southern region saw a 52 percent decrease in kelp canopy. The kelp canopy increased nearly everywhere throughout the central coast which gained an estimated 56 percent of kelp forest.

The computer modeling showed that sea otter population density was the strongest predictor in changes to kelp forest coverage. It also revealed that rising marine temperatures due to human-caused climate change were other factors in kelp loss. 

“Today, extreme heat in the ocean is intense and persistent. Beginning a decade ago, this threat now affects more than half the ocean’s surface,” study co-author and Duke University research scientist Kyle Van Houtan said in a statement. “This is a major problem for kelp forests as chronic temperature stress undermines kelp growth and health. Ecosystems are complex, and to give them their best chance at surviving these extreme changes, they need all their component parts. Sea otters, of course, are hugely influential for Pacific kelp forests. Historical studies like this are a crucial demonstration of this dynamic over the long term.”

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The plants and animals living in critical swampland or dwelling in dark caves can often get left behind by conservation efforts. Humans generally consider these organisms as less charismatic than other species that benefit from large awareness campaigns.  

[Related: Wetlands lose some environmental protections in new Supreme Court ruling.]

“When we generally talk about charismatic animals, we think of the poster children, so to say. Pandas, tigers, elephants, usually large mammals,” Christina Biggs, a biologist from conservation foundation Re:wild, tells PopSci. 

Focusing on the ‘under frogs’

Earth is facing a sixth wave of mass extinction that threatens all walks of life, charismatic or not. To help save them, Biggs is the lost species manager for Re:wild’s Search for Lost Species project, an initiative that is looking for 2,200 lost species across 160 countries. Since 2017, it has documented 12 of their 25 most wanted lost species. It’s timely work, as over 20 species were removed from the endangered species list due to extinction last year.

“We tend to focus on what we call the ‘under frogs,’ the things that are not as commonly studied,” says Biggs. “Everything that lives in an ecosystem is charismatic and plays a role that then supports the health of that entire area.”

These smaller, slimy, scaly, or scary creatures often don’t get the same amount of conservation attention and care from humans. Our species has an evolutionary bias to fear many of them for our own safety. These organisms then don’t get the same levels of awareness that they deserve or need, and that attention is critical for rediscovering lost or extinct species. Originally a marine biologist, Biggs admits that she has had to overcome her own biases when asked to crawl into caves in Madagascar and look at some of the animals living there. 

“You then stop and apply logic, and you think that’s why I’m here. I’m here to do these discoveries,” says Biggs. 

Losing more than we are rediscovering 

Biggs is a co-author of a study published January 17 in the journal Global Change Biology compiled a catalog of tetrapods–animals with four limbs–that were once considered lost to science, but were later rediscovered. Scientists consider a species lost if they have not been observed in the wild for over 10 years despite being searched for by scientists and citizen scientists alike. A rediscovered species is one that has been lost for at least a decade before being found. These rediscoveries sometimes happen by accident, such as the pygmy blue-tongue lizard, but they primarily come from extensive time in the field.

[Related: Elusive egg-laying mammal caught on camera for the first time.]

“We are losing tetrapod species more rapidly than we are rediscovering them,” study co-author and Free University of Berlin conservation scientist Thomas Evans tells PopSci. “So the number of lost species is increasing decade-on-decade. Not good news.”

According to Evans, lost species tend to be highly-threatened with extinction and have small populations. To create the lists for the study, the team worked with experts from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) based in different countries around the world and focussed on lost and rediscovered tetrapod species (birds, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals and reptiles). They identified more than 800 lost species and collected as much data as possible on what factors might help scientists rediscover them. Those variables included body size, whether their habitat is more isolated, and their relationship with human activities. 

Rediscovery can lead to successful conservation

Developing appropriate conservation methods for these species is important for saving them, but that can be incredibly difficult if scientists don’t know where a specific species might be living. 

[Related: How we can help the most endangered class of animals survive climate change.]

“Lost tetrapod species are a global phenomenon. About a quarter of lost bird species haven’t been seen in the wild for over 100 years,” says Evans. “Lost mammal species are on average three times heavier than rediscovered mammal species–these large, conspicuous lost species should probably have been rediscovered by now. They might be extinct.”

One of the study’s primary messages is the importance of paying attention to these less charismatic species that live in some hard to reach places. The team believes that more attention should be paid to amphibians and reptiles and that they deserve more conservation attention. 

A study from October 2023 found that two out of five amphibians are threatened with extinction and they continue to be the most threatened class of vertebrates. However, the same research found that the extinction risk of 63 species has been reduced due to conservation interventions made since the 1980s that can still work today. 

“When you start focusing attention and putting money behind things, it’s possible, it’s doable,” says Biggs. “It’s a great story of hope, because we are in the middle of this extinction crisis. Anything we could do to stave off those extinctions is really important.”

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

When people hear about underwater reefs, they usually picture colorful gardens created from coral. But some reefs are anchored to much more unusual foundations.

For more than a century, people have placed a wide assortment of objects on the seafloor off the US coast to provide habitat for marine life and recreational opportunities for fishing and diving. Artificial reefs have been created from decommissioned ships, chicken transport cages, concrete pipes, rail cars and more.

We study how ocean-dwelling fish use artificial reefs in the US and beyond. Through our research, we have learned that artificial reefs can be hot spots for large predatory fish such as groupers and jacks. They also can serve as stepping stones for reef fish expanding their range northward with warming water temperatures and as rest stops for sharks.

Artificial reefs can be strategically designed and placed to optimize fish habitat. But although they provide valuable ecological services, no one has inventoried how many of these structures exist in US waters or how much seafloor they occupy.

To help fill this knowledge gap, we led a team of scientists and artificial reef directors from the 17 US states with artificial reef-building programs in the first national calculation of artificial reef extent. Our new study shows that these reefs cover a total of about 7 square miles (19 square kilometers) of US seafloor–an area equivalent to 3,600 football fields. We also describe the diversity of objects used to create reefs, as well as patterns in artificial reef creation over time.

Creating modern artificial reefs

Modern reefing is different from dumping trash into the water and is regulated at the federal and state levels. A rigorous permitting and approval process ensures that the proposed objects or materials are appropriate to deploy in the ocean.

For example, decommissioned ships are thoroughly cleaned and drained of fuel and other polluting substances prior to sinking to minimize environmental risks. Some materials that were once used to create artificial reefs, such as rubber, fiberglass, wood and plastic, are now prohibited because they may move from their placed location, damaging nearby habitat, or deteriorate quickly in salt water.

Reefed objects can be sunk only in predesignated areas of the US seafloor. These zones, which are usually sandy sea bottom, total about 2,200 square miles (5,800 square kilometers) – roughly the area of Delaware.

Seven months after the Texas Parks and Wildlife Dept.’s artificial reef program sank the Kraken, a decommissioned 371-foot cargo ship, divers found it heavily colonized by ocean life.

Each zone can support the creation of many individual reefs over multiple decades. Within a given zone, reefed objects are usually placed away from one another, separated by large swaths of sand. This maximizes the amount of sand habitat, where some reef fish forage.

The extent of artificial reefs in these zones has increased by about 2,000 percent over the past 50 years. Since 2010, however, artificial reef extent has grown only 12 percent. This is likely because of challenges in acquiring and sinking acceptable reef materials. It could also reflect a push toward developing structures specifically for use as artificial reefs.

Planes, trains and automobiles

For our study, we gathered records of intentional reefings dating back to 1899 and occurring off artificial all US coastal states, except for six without artificial ocean reef programs: Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Oregon, Washington and Alaska.

For some of these events, especially in recent decades, there were detailed records of the sizes and quantities of sunken objects or seafloor maps from which we could derive these measurements. These reefs were easy to quantify.

Other records, including some from the early 20th century, had scant detail. For these, we developed an approach to estimate how much seafloor the reefs covered, based on similar deployments with better records.

Our study found a vast assortment of reefed objects on the US seafloor. They included decommissioned tugboats, fishing vessels, barges, ferries and military vessels. Reefs have also been created from rail boxcars, aircraft, vehicles, chicken transport cages, voting machines, missile platforms, concrete pipes, radio towers, tires, limestone rocks and objects purposely designed as artificial reefs.

Objects that occupy the largest amount of seafloor include limestone rocks, large concrete modules designed specifically for reefing, metal rigs and towers and long, narrow concrete pieces repurposed from their previous uses, such as culverts or bridges.

Potential impacts

After a reef is created, fish can appear within minutes or hours. The sequence of fish arrival sometimes follows a pattern. Transient fish such as jacks and barracuda come first, followed by bottom-dwelling fish such as grouper and smaller reef fish. With time, plants and animals grow on the hard surfaces of the artificial reef, helping to provide food and sanctuary for fish.

However, these reefs can also cause ecological harm. Invasive species, such as plants and other animals that grow on hard structures, can use artificial reefs to spread to new places.

Artificial reefs also may attract fish away from nearby natural reefs. Since constructed reefs are often in prime recreational fishing locations, this could lead to higher catches of those species.

Another risk is that if artificial reefs are improperly placed or secured on the sea floor, they can shift into unintended areas and harm sensitive habitats, particularly in the aftermath of storms. For example, Florida sank 1 million to 2 million tires offshore in the 1970s in an effort to create artificial reefs, but sea life didn’t colonize them as intended. Now the tires are washing around and smothering coral.

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Learning from artificial reefs

Monitoring how fish and other species use artificial reefs, especially compared with naturally occurring reefs, will be key for understanding benefits and risks from these structures. As climate change continues to alter ocean ecosystems, we see opportunities to learn which types of artificial reefs are best suited for enhancing habitat for particular sorts of fish.

For example, we know that large predators that dwell in open water, such as jacks, barracuda and sharks, tend to prefer taller artificial reefs over shorter ones. This is similar to insights from oil rigs, showing that these vertical and complex structures are valuable fish habitat. More than 500 decommissioned oil rigs have been converted to reefs. Our calculation included only those that are managed by state artificial reef programs.

Other structures in the water, such as offshore wind turbine foundations, will likely form habitat for sea life similarly to artificial reefs. Insights about what types of structures different fish prefer may help guide the design or location of offshore wind farms.

Humans rely on the ocean for many benefits, including food, commerce, energy and a stable climate. Measuring artificial reefs’ footprint is a first step toward understanding their effects, both good and bad, on ocean wildlife and human uses of the ocean.

Brendan Runde, a marine scientist at The Nature Conservancy, contributed to this article.

The post Not all underwater reefs are made of coral appeared first on Popular Science.

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Scientists have found the world’s largest deep-sea coral reef off the eastern coast of the United States. The massive 6.4 acre area stretches from Miami, Florida up to Charleston, South Carolina. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this is an area larger than the state of Vermont. The findings were described in a study published January 12 in the journal Geomatics.

[Related: To save coral reefs, color the larvae.]

The Blake Plateau is in the western Atlantic Ocean off the coasts of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Earlier studies of the area found that the region may be a dead zone–an area of the ocean that has less oxygen dissolved in water, which generally kills most of the sea life. During a multi-year mapping project of this perceived dead zone, scientists instead found a very alive ecosystem full of reef-building coral. 

“For years we thought much of the Blake Plateau was sparsely inhabited, soft sediment,” study co-author and NOAA Ocean Exploration Operations Chief Kasey Cantwell said in a statement. “Past studies have highlighted some coral in the region, particularly closer to the coast and in shallower waters, but until we had a complete map of the region, we didn’t know how extensive this habitat was, nor how many of these coral mounds were connected.”

There were hints that a massive reef was in the Blake Plateau first found in 2019, but scientists waited until a mapping project from NOAA, the University of New Hampshire, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Temple University, and the US Geological Survey could confirm it to officially announce it. They combined data from over 30 multi-beam sonar mapping surveys and 23 submersible dives to create a nearly complete map. They identified 83,908 individual coral mound peak features and a core area has high-density mounds that are up to 158 miles long and 26 miles wide. A nearly continuous coral mound spans 310 miles long and almost 68 miles wide, according to the study. 

[Related: Scientists are intentionally bleaching and ‘cryopreserving’ coral.]

The borders of the reef are between 35 and 75 miles off the coastline. A spot called Million Mounds makes up the largest part of the reef. It is built up of a stony coral that is usually found 656 to 3,280 feet below the surface where the temperature averages a chilly 39 degrees Fahrenheit. According to NOAA, these cold water corals grow in deeper parts of the ocean where there is no sunlight and filter feed on plankton and other organic material for sustinence. They are known to be “important ecosystem engineers” that create shelter, food, and a nursery for fish and other invertebrates, but they are still poorly understood. About 75 percent of the global ocean is still unmapped in detail, including roughly 50 percent of the marine waters of the United States. 

“This study provides a methodology aimed at interpreting mapping data over large ocean regions for insights into seafloor habitats and advancing standardized approaches to classifying them to support ecosystem-based management and conservation efforts,” Derek Sowers, study co-author and Mapping Operations Manager for NOAA’s Ocean Exploration Trust, said in a statement. 

The team hopes that the data collected about the Blake Plateau and its resources will help inform sustainable use and management of this and other reefs. 

The post World’s largest known deep-sea coral reef is bigger than Vermont appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Grist.

As spring arrived in southwestern Alaska, a handful of people from the state Department of Fish and Game rose early and climbed into small airplanes. Pilots flew through alpine valleys, where ribs of electric green growth emerged from a blanket of snow. Their shadows crisscrossed the lowland tundra, where thousands of caribou had gathered to calve. Seen through the windscreen, the vast plains can look endless; Wood-Tikchik State Park’s 1.6 million acres comprise almost a fifth of all state park land in the United States.

As the crew flew, it watched for the humped shape of brown bears lumbering across the hummocks. When someone spotted one, skinny from its hibernation, the crew called in the location to waiting helicopters carrying shooters armed with 12-gauge shotguns. 

Over the course of 17 days, the team killed 94 brown bears—including several year-old cubs, who stuck close to their mothers, and 11 newer cubs that were still nursing—five black bears and five wolves. That was nearly four times the number of animals the agency planned to cull. Fish and Game says this reduced the area’s bear population by 74 percent, though no baseline studies to determine their numbers were conducted in the area. 

The goal was to help the dwindling number of Mulchatna caribou by reducing the number of predators around their calving grounds. The herd’s population has plummeted, from 200,000 in 1997 to around 12,000 today. But the killings set off a political and scientific storm, with many biologists and advocates saying the operation called into question the core of the agency’s approach to managing wildlife, and may have even violated the state constitution. 

The Board of Game, which has regulatory authority over wildlife, insisted that intensive control of predators in Wood-Tikchik was the best way to support the struggling herd. But the caribou, which provide essential food and cultural resources for many Alaska Native communities, are facing multiple threats: A slew of climate-related impacts have hampered their grazing, wildfires have burned the forage they rely on, warmer winters may have increased disease, and thawing permafrost has disrupted their migrations.

With conditions rapidly changing as the planet warms, wildlife managers nationwide are facing similar biodiversity crises. Rather than do the difficult work of mitigating rising temperatures, state agencies across the country are finding it easier to blame these declines on predation.

“We don’t want to talk about how the tundra is changing, because that’s something we can’t fix,” says Christi Heun, a former research biologist at Alaska Fish and Game.

In Wyoming, where a deadly winter decimated pronghorn and mule deer, the state spent a record $4.2 million killing coyotes and other predators and is considering expanding bear and mountain lion hunts. Wildlife officials in Washington are contemplating killing sea lions and seals to save faltering salmon populations from extinction. In Minnesota, hunters are inaccurately blaming wolves for low deer numbers and calling for authorities to reduce their population. Culls like these are appealing because they are tangible actions—even when evidence suggests the true threat is much more complex. “You’re putting a Band-Aid on the wrong elbow,” says Heun, who now works for the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife. 

As the climate crisis intensifies, she and others say, wildlife management strategies need to shift too. “All we can do is just kind of cross our fingers and mitigate the best we can,” she adds. For people whose job is to control natural systems, “that’s a hard pill to swallow.”

In January 2022, a flurry of snow fell as the Alaska Board of Game gathered in Wasilla, far from where the Mulchatna caribou pawed through drifts, steam rising from their shaggy backs. Its seven members are appointed by the governor. Though they make important decisions like when hunting seasons open, how long they last, and how many animals hunters can take, they are not required to have a background in biology or natural resources. They also do not have to possess any expertise in the matters they decide. Board members, who did not respond to requests for comment, tend to reflect the politics of the administration in office; currently, under Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy, they are sport hunters, trappers, and guides. 

That day, the agenda included a proposal to expand a wolf control program from Wood-Tikchik onto the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge—though that would require federal approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; the government ultimately rejected the proposal.

The conversation began with two Fish and Game biologists summarizing their research for the board on the herd. Nick Demma explained that, like most ungulates, on average half of Mulchatna’s calves survive. In a study he conducted, many died within two weeks of birth; he mentioned as an aside that their primary predators are brown bears. “But I want to stress that this basic cause of death and mortality rate information is of little use,” he quickly added. Predator and prey dynamics are complex: The calves may have died anyway from injury or disease, and their removal may reduce competition for food and resources, improving the herd’s overall health. 

When Demma tried to analyze the existing wolf control program, he found he didn’t have the data he needed to see if removing the canines helped calves survive. In fact, from 2010 to 2021, when Fish and Game was actively shooting wolves, fewer caribou survived. So the researchers turned their attention to other challenges the herd might be facing. 

His colleague, Renae Sattler, explained that preliminary data from a three-year study suggested there could be a problem with forage quality or quantity, especially in the summer. This could lower pregnancy rates or increase disease and calf mortality. In the 1990s, the herd had swelled as part of a natural boom-and-bust cycle, leading to overgrazing. The slow-growing lichen the animals rely on takes 20 to 50 years to recover. Compounding that, climate change is altering the tundra ecosystem the animals rely upon. She also found that today, 37 percent of the sampled animals had, or were recently exposed to, brucellosis, which can cause abortions, stillbirths, and injuries. Biologists consider such high levels of disease an outbreak and cause for concern.

Sattler also noted that half of the animals that died in the study’s first year were killed by hunters taking them out of season—meaning the predators killing the most adult caribou were people. For all these reasons, the biologists suggested that the Board of Game reconsider the wolf control program.

Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang, who oversees the agency, immediately questioned their conclusions, and their recommendation. Killing predators, he said during the meeting, “seems like one of the only things that’s within our direct control.” In other words, it was better than doing nothing. 

Demma seemed taken aback, and chose his words carefully. “I guess what we are kind of trying to present there is just the information,” he told the board. “It’s—you know—wolves aren’t an important factor right now.” The meeting broke for lunch. When it resumed, the board unanimously voted to continue the wolf program through 2028, and, even more surprisingly, to add brown and black bears over a larger area. The public and Fish and Game biologists didn’t have the typical opportunity to comment on this expansion of predator control.

When he heard what happened, “I just was stunned. I was shocked,” says Joel Bennett, a lawyer and a former member of the Board of Game for 13 years. A hunter himself, Bennett served on the board under four governors and recalls his colleagues having a greater diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. Their votes were always split, even on less contentious issues. The unanimous vote “in itself indicates it’s a stacked deck,” he says. That’s a problem, because “the system only works fairly if there is true representation.”

In August, Bennett and the Alaska Wildlife Alliance filed a lawsuit claiming the agency approved the operation without the necessary “reasoned decision-making,” and without regard for the state’s due process requirements. Bennett also was troubled that the state has tried to keep information about the cull private, including where the bears were killed. He suspects that, to have slain so many animals in just 17 days, the flights might have veered beyond the targeted area. He also wonders if any animals were left wounded. “Why are they hiding so many of the details?” he asked. A public records request reveals that although the board expected the removal of fewer than 20 bears, almost five times that many were culled without any additional consideration. 

Alaska’s wildlife is officially a public resource. Provisions in the state constitution mandate game managers provide for “sustained yields,” including for big game animals like bears. That sometimes clashes with the Dunleavy administration’s focus on predator control. In 2020, for example, the board authorized a no-limit wolf trapping season on the Alexander Archipelago, a patchwork of remote islands in southeast Alaska. It resulted in the deaths of all but five of the genetically distinct canines. The Alaska Wildlife Alliance sued, a case Bennett is now arguing before the state Supreme Court. “That was a gross violation of ‘sustained yield’ in anyone’s definition,” he says, adding that even today, there is no limit on trapping wolves there.

Once, shooting bison from moving trains and leaving them to rot was widely accepted. Attitudes have evolved, as have understandings about predators’ importance—recent research suggests their stabilizing presence may play a crucial role in mitigating some of the effects of climate change. Other studies show predators may help prey adapt more quickly to shifting conditions. But Bennett worries that, just as Alaska’s wildlife faces new pressures in a warming world, management priorities are reverting to earlier stances on how to treat animals. “I’ve certainly done my time in the so-called ‘wolf wars,’” Bennett says, “but we’re entering a new era here with other predators.”

Even as legal challenges to the board’s decisions move forward, scientific debate over the effectiveness of predator control has flourished. Part of the problem is that game management decisions are rarely studied in the way scientists would design an experiment. “You’ve got a wild system, with free-ranging animals, and weather, and other factors that are constantly changing,” says Tom Paragi, a wildlife biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game. “It’s just not amenable to the classic research design.” Even getting baseline data can take years, and remote areas like Wood-Tikchik, which is accessible only by air or boat, are challenging and expensive places to work. 

Paragi has for more than a decade monitored the state’s intensive wildlife management programs and believes predator control can be effective. Looking at data collected since 2003, he notes that when Alaska culled wolves in four areas in a bid to bolster moose, caribou, and deer populations, their numbers increased. They also remained low in those areas where wolves were left alone. (His examination of this data has not yet been published or subject to peer review.) Elsewhere in the state, removing 96 percent of black bears in 2003 and 2004, reducing hunting, and killing wolves boosted the number of moose. Heavy snowfall during the next two winters killed many of the calves, and most of the bears returned within six years, but Paragi still considers the efforts a success. By 2009, the moose population had almost doubled.

He’s also not convinced that Demma and Sattler were right when they told board members that predation doesn’t appear to be the most pressing issue for the Mulchatna caribou. He says record salmon runs have likely brought more bears near the park and the calving grounds, and warmer temperatures have fostered the growth of vegetation that provides places to hide as they stalk caribou. As to the suggestion that the herd is suffering from inadequate food supplies, he notes that their birth rate has been high since 2009. That’s often a strong indicator of good nutrition. 

But Sattler says, “It isn’t that cut-and-dried.” A female caribou’s body condition, she explains, exists on a spectrum and affects her survival, the size and strength of any calves, and how long she can nurse or how quickly she gets pregnant again. “The impact of nutrition is wide-reaching and complex, and it isn’t captured in pregnancy rates alone.” Understanding how nutrition, brucellosis, and other factors are impacting the herd is complicated, she says. 

There are a lot of interacting factors at play on the tundra—and among those trying to determine how best to help the herd. “Part of the frustration on all sides of this is that people have different value systems related to managing wild systems,” Paragi says. To him, last spring’s bear kill wasn’t truly a question of science. “We can present the data, but what you do with the data is ultimately a political decision,” he says. 

Sterling Miller, a retired Fish and Game research biologist and former president of the International Association for Bear Research and Management, acknowledges that crafting regulations is left to the politically appointed Board of Game. But Miller says the agency tends to dismiss criticism of its predator control, when there are valid scientific questions about its effectiveness. In 2022, Miller and his colleagues published an analysis, using Fish and Game harvest data, showing that 40 years of killing predators in an area of south-central Alaska didn’t result in more harvests of moose. “Fish and Game has never pointed out any factual or analytical errors in the analyses that I’ve been involved with,” he says. “Instead, they try to undercut our work by saying it’s based on values.”  

Miller also was involved in what remains one of the agency’s best examples of predator relocations. In 1979, he and another biologist moved 47 brown bears out of a region in south-central Alaska, which resulted in a “significant” increase in the survival of moose calves the next fall. But Miller says Fish and Game often misquotes that work. In reality, due to a lack of funding, Miller didn’t study the young animals long enough to see if they actually reached adulthood. Similarly, Fish and Game conducted an aerial survey this fall of the Mulchatna herd, finding more calves survived after the bear cullings. But Miller and other biologists say that’s not the best metric to measure the operation’s success: These calves may still perish during their first winter. 

The Alaskan government is the only one in the world whose goal is to reduce the number of brown bears, Miller says, despite the absence of baseline studies on how many bears are in this part of the state. It irks him that the state continues to use his research as justification for allowing predator measures like bear baiting. In most parts of Alaska, Miller says, “the liberalization of bear hunting regulations has just been so extreme.” 

While last year’s bear killings were particularly egregious, similar cullings have gone largely unnoticed. State data shows over 1,000 wolves and 3,500 brown and black bears have been killed since 2008 alone. In 2016, for example, the federal government shared radio tag information with the state, which used it to kill wolves when they left the safety of the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve—destroying so many packs that it ended a 20-year study on predator-prey relationships. “There weren’t enough survivors to maintain a self-sustaining population,” recounted an investigation by the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. The nearby caribou herd still failed to recover.

Multiple employees for Fish and Game, who didn’t want to be named amid fear of repercussions, told Grist that the agency was ignoring basic scientific principles, and that political appointees to the Board were not equipped to judge the effectiveness of these programs.

Even these criticisms of the agency’s science have been subject to politics: This summer, a committee of the American Society of Mammalogists drafted a resolution speaking out about Alaska’s predator control—only for it to be leaked to Fish and Game, which put up enough fuss that it was dropped. Link Olson, the curator of mammals at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, was one of many who supported the group taking a position on the issue. Olson says that even as someone who “actively collect[s] mammal specimens for science,” he is deeply concerned with Alaska’s approach to managing predators.

A month later, 34 retired wildlife managers and biologists wrote an open letter criticizing the bear cull and calling the agency’s management goals for the Mulchatna herd “unrealistic.” Meanwhile, neither Demma nor Sattler, the biologists who cautioned the board, are still studying the herd; Demma now works in a different area of the agency, and Sattler has left the state and taken a new job, for what she says are a variety of reasons.

Every fall, millions of people follow a live-streamed view of the biggest bears in Katmai National Park, which sits southeast of Wood-Tikchik. The animals jockey for fish before their hibernation, in an annual bulking up that the National Park Service has turned into a playful competition, giving the bears nicknames like “Chunk,” and, for a particularly large behemoth, 747. 

Though marked on maps, animals like 747 don’t know where the comparative safety of the national park ends and where state management begins. This can mean the difference between life and death, as Alaskan and federal agencies have taken very different approaches to predator control: The National Park Service generally prohibits it. This has sparked a years-long federalism battle. Back in 2015, for example, the Board of Game passed a rule allowing brown bear baiting in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, leading the Fish and Wildlife Service to ban it in 2016. The state sued, and in 2020 the Trump administration proposed forcing national wildlife refuges to adopt Alaska’s hunting regulations. Similarly, the National Park Service challenged whether it had to allow practices like using spotlights to blind and shoot hibernating bears in their dens in national park preserves. In 2022, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal agencies have ultimate authority over state laws in refuges; last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

How these agencies interact with local communities is markedly different, too. Both Alaska Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have regional advisory groups where residents can weigh in on game regulations, but Alissa Nadine Rogers, a resident of the Yukon- Kuskokwim Delta who sits on each, says that, unlike the federal government, it feels like “the state of Alaska does not recognize subsistence users as a priority.” On paper, the state prioritizes subsistence use, but under its constitution, Alaska can’t distinguish between residents, whereas the federal government can put the needs of local and traditional users first. This has frequently led to separate and overlapping state and federal regulations on public lands in Alaska. 

Many people in the region rely on wildlife for a substantial part of their diet. Since the area isn’t connected by roads, groceries must be barged or flown in, making them expensive—a gallon of milk can cost almost $20. In addition to being an important food source, caribou are a traditional part of her Yupik culture, Rogers explains, used for tools and regalia. It’s a real burden for local communities to be told they can’t hunt caribou, which has driven poaching. As state and federal regulations have increased restrictions on hunting, she says residents have difficulty obtaining enough protein to sustain themselves through the winter. “If people don’t understand how it is to live out here, what true perspective do they have?” she asks. “Subsistence users are the ones who bear the burden when it comes to management. And a lot of the time, folks aren’t feeling that their voices are being heard or adequately represented.”

Yet Rogers says state and federal systems can provide an important balance to each other, and she approves of Fish and Game’s predator control efforts. As the former director of natural resources for the Orutsararmiut Native Council, she helped the council write a resolution, later passed by the statewide Alaska Federation of Natives, supporting last spring’s bear and wolf cull. She thinks officials should focus more on climate change but believes culling remains a useful tool. “It gives a vital chance for the [caribou] population and immediately supports growth and recovery,” Rogers says. She also asked Fish and Game to institute a five-year moratorium on all hunting of the herd. “If we go any lower, then we’re pretty much gonna be facing extinction.”

Who gets to make choices about the state’s fish and wildlife resources is a point of increasing tension this year, as a lawsuit unfolds between the state and federal government over who should manage salmon fisheries on the Kuskokwim River, to the west of the Togiak refuge. All five of its salmon returns have faltered for over a decade—making game like caribou even more critical for local communities. (In sharp contrast, to the east of the river, Bristol Bay has seen record recent returns, showing how variable climate impacts can be.) The Alaska Native Federation and the federal government say fishing should be limited to subsistence users, while the state has opened fishing to all state residents.

To ensure Alaska Native communities have a voice in such critical decisions, the Federation called for tribally designated seats on the Board of Game this fall. “We need to have a balanced Board of Game that represents all Alaskans,” says former Governor Tony Knowles. He, too, recommends passing a law to designate seats on the board for different types of wildlife stakeholders, including Alaska Native and rural residents, conservationists, biologists, recreational users, and others. Knowles also proposes an inquiry into Fish and Game’s bear killings, including recommendations on how to better involve the public in these decisions. “We deserve to know how this all happened so it won’t happen again.”

It’s clear to many that business as usual isn’t working. “I have no idea how the state comes up with their management strategy,” says Brice Eningowuk, the tribal administrator for the council of the Traditional Village of Togiak, an Alaska Native village on the outskirts of the Togiak refuge. He says Fish and Game didn’t tell his community about the bear cull, and he expressed skepticism that primarily killing bears would work. “Bears will eat caribou, but that’s not their primary food source,” he says.

Part of the solution is setting more realistic wildlife goals, according to Pat Walsh, whose career as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist involved supervising the caribou program in the Togiak refuge. Recently retired, he says the current goal for the Mulchatna herd size was set 15 years ago, when the population was at 30,000, and is no longer realistic. Reducing that goal could allow targeted subsistence use—which might help ease some of the poaching. Though Fish and Game has killed wolves around the Mulchatna herd for 12 years, he points out the caribou population has steadily dropped. “We recommended the board reassess the ecological situation,” he says, and develop goals “based on the current conditions, not something that occurred in the past.” 

Today’s landscape already looks quite different. Alaska has warmed twice as quickly as the global average, faster than any other state. When Rogers was in high school, she tested the permafrost near her house as an experiment. As a freshman, she only had to jam the spade in the ground before she hit ice. By the time she was a senior, it thawed to a depth of 23 inches—and in one location, to 4 feet. Summers have been cold and wet, and winters have brought crippling ice storms, rather than snow. Berry seasons have failed, and the normally firm and springy tundra has “disintegrated into mush,” Rogers says.

Feeling the very ground change beneath her feet highlights how little sway she has over these shifts. “How are you gonna yell at the clouds? ‘Hey, quit raining. Hey, you, quit snowing’?” Rogers asked. “There’s no way you can change something that is completely out of your control. We can only adapt.”

Yet despite how quickly these ecosystems are shifting, the Department of Fish and Game has no climate scientists. In the meantime, the agency is authorized to continue killing bears on the Mulchatna calving grounds every year until 2028. (The board plans to hear an annual report on the state’s intensive management later this month.) As Walsh summarizes wryly, “It’s difficult to address habitat problems. It’s difficult to address disease problems. It’s easy to say, ’Well, let’s go shoot.’” 

Management decisions can feel stark in the face of nature’s complexity. The tundra is quite literally made from relationships. The lichen the caribou feed on is a symbiotic partnership between two organisms. Fungus provides its intricately branching structure, absorbing water and minerals from the air, while algae produces its energy, bringing together sunlight and soil, inseparable from the habitat they form. These connections sustain the life that blooms and eats and dies under a curving sweep of sky. It’s a system, in the truest and most obvious sense — one that includes the humans deciding what a population can recover from, and what a society can tolerate. 

As another season of snow settles in, the caribou cross the landscape in great, meandering lines. There are thousands of years of migrations behind them and an uncertain future ahead. Like so much in nature, it’s hard to draw a clear threshold. “Everything is going to change,” Rogers says.