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    This bird hasn’t been seen in 38 years. Its song may help track it down

    How do you look for an animal you don’t even know exists anymore?

    The last sighting of the purple-winged ground dove (Paraclaravis geoffroyi) — a small, bamboo-loving dove native to the South American Atlantic Forest in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay — was in 1985. But, researchers wondered, was it possible to capture the elusive bird’s sound in the wild to find out if any individuals are left?

    It’s not an unheard-of idea. Scientists have used bioacoustics — a subfield of ecology that relies on sound to make environmental analyses — for everything from recording dolphins’ communication patterns to studying bats from afar to avoid virus spillover from humans (SN: 12/7/17; SN: 10/23/22). With artificial intelligence, it is now possible to use large audio datasets to train algorithms to spot different animal sounds within the cacophony of a natural background.

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    But the problem is that recordings of the purple-winged ground dove singing are as rare as the bird itself.

    “I came across [the bird’s song] watching a 1985 interview with Carlos Keller, a former bird breeder in São Paulo state, who had a few individuals of the dove,” says Carlos Araújo, an ecologist at the Instituto de Biología Subtropical at the Universidad Nacional de Misiones in Argentina. “And they sang while he spoke.”

    With Keller’s help, Araujo and colleagues accessed the decades-old recording and isolated the bird’s song.

    The next challenge was to see if it was even possible to identify individual bird songs amidst the sounds of other birds chirping, leaves rustling, rain falling, insects whirring and gnawing and larger animals moving through the forest.

    “We took a step back and did some analyses with other birds that are critically endangered but there are known individuals,” Araújo says. The team focused on three species found in Foz do Iguaçu, a national park that straddles the border of Brazil and Argentina: the cherry-throated tanager (Nemosia rourei), the Alagoas antwren (Myrmotherula snowi) and the blue-eyed ground-dove (Columbina cyanopis). These birds live in the same environments as the purple-winged ground dove. And the blue-eyed ground dove’s story inspires hope: The species went missing in 1941 and was rediscovered in 2016.

    To test their setup, the researchers looked for the cherry-throated tanager (shown) and two other rare birds.Ben Phalan/Parque das Aves

    The researchers installed 30 recorders in strategic spots along green areas in the Brazilian part of Foz do Iguaçu and recorded from July 2021 to April 2022. They also used data from another 100 recorders on the Argentinian side of Foz.

    “We went looking for the Guadua trinii bamboo to place the recorders,” says Benjamin Phalan, Head of Conservation at Parque das Aves, a private institution in Foz do Iguaçu focused on the conservation of Atlantic Forest birds. Like the purple-winged ground dove, the three bird species follow the flowering season of the G. trinii bamboo, which happens about once every 30 years.

    The team pushed through thickets of bamboo, braved ticks and biting flies, and watched out for venomous snakes such as jacaracas pit vipers. Bumping into these snakes is “rare but can happen. So we use galoshes or gaiters to protect us in case anyone steps on a snake or near it,” Phalan says.

    Carlos de Araujo installs a recording device in a South American forest. He and colleagues hope to pluck the song of rare birds out of the forest sounds the device picks up. Ben Phalan/Parque das Aves

    The recorders captured one minute of landscape sound every 10 minutes and generated about 3,000 days’ worth of recordings. “A lot of data to sift through,” says Araújo.

    Readily available analysis software wouldn’t work. These software, Araújo says, “need a lot of data input. With such rare species, we just don’t have that much data to train the identification algorithm.”

    So the team started from scratch, working with the little data they had for the three endangered birds. First, Araújo created a signal template — exactly like the birds’ singing — based on just a few recordings. The algorithm then compares that template with the soundscape recordings, separating signal from noise. If it spots a sound that is similar to the template, chances are that it is the bird that the researchers are looking for.

    The method relies on a statistical model “that is not new, but was used in a very clever and unusual way,” says David Donoso, an ecosystem ecology researcher at the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. Donoso and colleagues recently used bioacoustics to investigate the recovery of Choco, a biodiversity hot spot in Ecuador that had been transformed in an agricultural area.

    There are different approaches to bioacoustics depending on what you’re looking for, Donoso says. “You can either use fewer recordings to map a whole animal soundscape to tell what species are there, like we did, or you can use lots of recordings to look for a single sound pattern,” he says. The study at Foz do Iguaçu “shows that you can use a relatively simple model to answer a complex question — and it works.”

    The tool worked reasonably well to identify the cherry-throated tanager and blue-eyed ground-dove singing, but not so much for the Alagoas antwren, Araújo’s team reports October 23 in Bioacoustics. “We’re trying to understand what happened, but we know that the algorithm works,” he says.

    The next step, Araújo says, is to refine the algorithm’s precision to find the Alagoas antwren and train it to look for the purple-winged ground dove. And they will do so at the same time. “We’re aiming at both goals at once because we’re running against the clock to find these birds,” Araújo says. “In the end, we are looking for a ghost.” But not a silent one, he hopes.  More

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    Capturing methane from the air would slow global warming. Can it be done?

    This summer was the hottest ever recorded on Earth, and 2023 is on track to be the hottest year. Heat waves threatened people’s health across North America, Europe and Asia. Canada had its worst wildfire season ever, and flames devastated the city of Lahaina in Maui. Los Angeles was pounded by an unheard-of summer tropical storm while rains in Libya caused devastating floods that left thousands dead and missing. This extreme weather is a warning sign that we are living in a climate crisis, and a call to action.

    Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main culprit behind climate change, and scientists say they must be reined in. But there’s another greenhouse gas to deal with: methane. Tackling methane may be the best bet for putting the brakes on rising temperatures in the short term, says Rob Jackson, an Earth systems scientist at Stanford University and chair of the Global Carbon Project, which tracks greenhouse gas emissions. “Methane is the strongest lever we have to slow global warming over the next few decades.”

    That’s because it’s relatively short-lived in the atmosphere — methane lasts about 12 years, while CO2 can stick around for hundreds of years. And on a molecule-per-molecule basis, methane is more potent. Over the 20-year period after it’s emitted, methane can warm the atmosphere more than 80 times as much as an equivalent amount of CO2.

    We already have strategies for cutting methane emissions — fixing natural gas leaks (methane is the main component of natural gas), phasing out coal (mining operations release methane), eating less meat and dairy (cows burp up lots of methane) and electrifying transportation and appliances. Implementing all existing methane-mitigation strategies could slow global warming by 30 percent over the next decade, research has shown.

    But some climate scientists, including Jackson, say we need to go further. Several methane sources will be difficult, if not impossible, to eliminate. That includes some human-caused emissions, such as those produced by rice paddies and cattle farming — though practices do exist to reduce these emissions (SN: 11/28/15, p. 22). Some natural sources are poised to release more methane as the world warms. There are signs that tropical wetlands are already releasing more of the gas into the atmosphere, and rapid warming in the Arctic could turn permafrost into a hot spot for methane-making microbes and release a bomb of methane stored in the currently frozen soil.

    So scientists want to develop ways to remove methane directly from the air.

    Three billion metric tons more methane exist in the atmosphere today than in preindustrial times. Removing that excess methane would cool the planet by 0.5 degrees Celsius, Jackson says.

    Similar “negative emissions” strategies are already in limited use for CO2. That gas is captured where it’s emitted, or directly from the air, and then stored somewhere. Methane, however, is a tricky molecule to capture, meaning scientists need different approaches.

    Most ideas are still in early research stages. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is currently studying these potential technologies, their state of readiness and possible risks, and what further research and funding are needed. Some of the approaches include re-engineering bacteria that are already pros at eating methane and developing catalytic reactors to place in coal-mine vents and other methane-rich places to chemically transform the gas.

    “Methane is a sprint and CO2 is a marathon,” says Desirée Plata, a civil and environmental engineer at MIT. For scientists focused on removing greenhouse gases, it’s off to the races.

    Microbes already remove methane from the air

    Methane, CH4, is readily broken down in the atmosphere, where sunshine and highly reactive hydroxyl radicals are abundant. But it’s a different story when chemists try to work with the molecule. Methane’s four carbon-hydrogen bonds are strong and stable. Currently, chemists must expose the gas to extremely high temperatures and pressures to break it down.

    Even getting hold of the gas is difficult. Despite its potent warming power, it’s present in low concentrations in the atmosphere. Only 2 out of every 1 million air molecules are methane (by comparison, about 400 of every 1 million air molecules are CO2). So it’s challenging to grab enough methane to store it or efficiently convert it into something else.

    Nature’s chemists, however, can take up and transform methane even in these challenging conditions. These microbes, called methanotrophs, use enzymes to eat methane. The natural global uptake of methane by methanotrophs living in soil is about 30 million metric tons per year. Compare that with the roughly 350 million tons of methane that human activities pumped into the atmosphere in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.

    Microbiologists want to know whether it’s possible to get these bacteria to take up more methane more quickly.

    Lisa Stein, a microbiologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, studies the genetics and physiology of these microbes. “We do basic research to understand how they thrive in different environments,” she says.

    Methanotrophs work especially slowly in low-oxygen environments, Stein says, like wetland muck and landfills, the kinds of places where methane is plentiful. In these environments, microbes that make methane, called methanogens, generate the gas faster than methanotrophs can gobble it up.

    But it might be possible to develop soil amendments and other ecosystem modifications to speed microbial methane uptake, Stein says. She’s also talking with materials scientists about engineering a surface to encourage methanotrophs to grow faster and thus speed up their methane consumption.

    Scientists hope to get around this speed bump with a more detailed understanding of the enzyme that helps many methanotrophs feast on methane. Methane monooxygenase, or MMO, grabs the molecule and, with the help of copper embedded in the enzyme, uses oxygen to break methane’s carbon-hydrogen bonds. The enzyme ultimately produces methanol that the microbes then metabolize.

    Boosting MMO’s speed could not only help with methane removal but also allow engineers to put methanotrophs to work in industrial systems. Turning methane into methanol would be the first step, followed by several faster reactions, to make an end product like plastic or fuel.

    Some bacteria, including Methylococcus capsulatus (shown), naturally break down methane with the enzyme methane monooxygenase. By studying the enzyme’s structure, scientists hope to speed up bacteria’s uptake of the greenhouse gas.Anne Fjellbirkeland/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

    “Methane monooxygenases are not superfast enzymes,” says Amy Rosenzweig, a chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Any reaction involving MMO will impose a speed limit on the proceedings. “That is the key step, and unless you understand it, it’s going to be very difficult to make an engineered organism do what you want,” Rosenzweig says.

    Enzymes are often shaped to fit their reactants — in this case, methane — like a glove. So having a clear view of MMO’s physical structure could help researchers tweak the enzyme’s actions. MMO is embedded in a lipid membrane in the cell. To image it, structural biologists have typically started by using detergents to remove the lipids, which inactivates the enzyme and results in an incomplete picture of it and its activity. But Rosenzweig and colleagues recently managed to image the enzyme in this lipid context. This unprecedented view of MMO in its native state, published in 2022 in Science, revealed a previously unseen site where copper binds.

    But that’s still not the entire picture. Rosenzweig says she hopes her structural studies, along with other work, will lead to a breakthrough soon enough to help forestall further consequences of global warming. “Maybe people get lucky and engineer a strain quickly,” Rosenzweig says. “You don’t know until you try.”

    Chemists make progress on catalysts

    Other scientists seek to put methane-destroying chemical reactors close to methane sources. These reactors typically use a catalyst to speed up the chemical reactions that convert methane into a less planet-warming molecule. These catalysts often require high temperatures or other stringent conditions to operate, contain expensive metals like platinum, and don’t work well at the concentrations of methane found in ambient air.

    One promising place to start, though, is coal mines. Coal mining is associated with tens of millions of tons of methane emissions worldwide every year. Although coal-fired power plants are being phased out in many countries, coal will be difficult to eliminate entirely due to its key role in steel production, says Plata, of MIT.

    To develop a catalyst that might work in a coal mine, Plata found inspiration in MMO. Her team developed a catalyst material based on a silicate material embedded with copper — the same metal found in MMO and much less expensive than those usually required to oxidize methane. The material is also porous, which improves the catalyst’s efficiency because it has a larger surface area, and thus more places for reactions to occur, than a nonporous material would. The catalyst turns methane into CO2, a reaction that releases heat, which is needed to further fuel the reaction. If methane concentrations are high enough, the reaction will be self-sustaining, Plata says.

    Turning methane into CO2 may sound counterproductive, but it reduces warming overall because methane traps much more heat than CO2 and is far less abundant in the atmosphere. If all the excess methane in the atmosphere were turned into CO2, according to a 2019 study led by Jackson, it would result in only 8.2 billion additional tons of CO2 — equivalent to just a few months of CO2 emissions at today’s rates. And the net effect would be to lessen the heating of the atmosphere by a sixth.

    Cattle feedlots are another place where Plata’s catalytic reactor might work. Barns outfitted with fans to keep cattle comfortable move air around, so reactors could be fitted to these ventilation systems. The next step is determining whether methane concentrations at industrial dairy farms are high enough for the catalyst to work.

    At Drumgoon Dairy in South Dakota, Elijah Martin (left) and Will Sawyer (right) test a small-scale thermal catalytic unit developed in Desirée Plata’s lab at MIT. The reactor transforms methane into carbon dioxide, which could lower the planet’s net warming rate because methane is a stronger greenhouse gas.D. Plata

    Another researcher making progress is energy scientist and engineer Arun Majumdar, one of Jackson’s collaborators at Stanford. In January, Majumdar published initial results describing a catalyst that converts methane into methanol, with an added boost from high-energy ultraviolet light. This UV blast adds the energy needed to overcome CH4’s stubborn bonds — and the carefully designed catalyst stays on target. Previous catalyst designs tended to produce a mix of CO2 and methanol, but this catalyst mostly sticks to making methanol.

    Is geoengineering a path to methane removal?

    A more extreme approach to speed up methane’s natural breakdown is to change the chemistry of the atmosphere itself. A few companies, such as the U.S.-based Blue Dot Change, have proposed releasing chemicals into the sky to enhance methane oxidation.

    Natalie Mahowald, an atmospheric chemist at Cornell University, decided to evaluate this type of geoengineering.

    “I’m not super excited about throwing more things into the atmosphere,” Mahowald says. To meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, limiting global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average, though, it’s worth exploring all possibilities, she says. “If we’re going to meet these targets,” she says “we’re going to need some of these crazy ideas to work. So I’m willing to look at it. But I’m looking with a scientist’s critical eye.”

    The main strategy proposed by advocates would inject iron aerosols into the air over the ocean on a sunny day. These aerosols would react with salty sea spray aerosols to form chlorine, which would then attack methane in the atmosphere and initiate further chemical reactions that turn it into CO2. Mahowald wondered how much chlorine would be needed — and if there might be any unintended consequences.

    Detailed modeling revealed something alarming. The iron injections could have the opposite of the intended effect, Mahowald and colleagues reported in July in Nature Communications. Chlorine won’t attack methane if ozone is around. Instead, chlorine will first break down all the ozone it can find. But ozone plays a key role in generating the hydroxyl radicals that naturally break down atmospheric methane. So when ozone levels fall, Mahowald says, the concentration and lifetime of methane molecules in the atmosphere actually increases. To use this strategy to break down methane, geo­engineers would need to add a tremendous amount of chlorine to the atmosphere — enough to first break down the ozone, then attack methane.

    Removing 20 percent of the atmosphere’s methane, thus reducing the planet’s surface temperature by 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2050, for example, would require creating about 630 million tons of atmospheric chlorine every year. That would in turn require injecting perhaps tens of millions of tons of iron. A form of particulate matter, these iron aerosols could worsen air quality; inhaling particulate matter is associated with a range of health problems, particularly cardiovascular and lung disease. This atmospheric tinkering could also create hydrochloric acid that could reach the ocean and acidify it.

    And there’s no guarantee that some of the chlorine wouldn’t make it all the way up to the ozone layer, depleting the planetary shield that protects us from the sun’s harmful UV rays. Mahowald is still studying this possibility.

    Methane is a sprint and CO2 is a marathon. Desirée Plata

    Mahowald is ambivalent about doing research on geoengineering. “We’re just throwing out ideas here because we’re in a terrible, terrible position,” she says. She’s worried about what could happen if all the methane locked up in the world’s permafrost escapes. If scientists can figure out how to use iron aerosols effectively, without adverse effects — and if such geoengineering is accepted by society — we might need it.

    “We’re just trying to see, is there any hope this could work and would we ever want to do it? Would it have enough benefits to outweigh the disadvantages?”

    The committee organized by the National Academies to investigate methane removal is taking these kinds of ethical questions into account, as well as considering the potential cost and scale of technologies. Stein, a committee member, says a framework proposed by Spark Climate Solutions provides some guidance. The organization, a nonprofit based in San Francisco that evaluates methane-removal technologies, proposes investing in tech that can remove tens of millions of tons of methane per year in the coming decades, at a cost of less than $2,000 per ton. Spark cofounder David Mann says the numbers are designed to focus attention and investment on technologies that can make a real difference in curbing climate change in the near term.

    The National Academies group aims to make recommendations about research priorities on methane-removal technologies by next summer. It’s likely that a portfolio of different technologies will be necessary. What works in a cattle feedlot may not work at a wastewater treatment plant, for instance.

    Scientists focused on methane removal are eager for more researchers, research funding and companies to enter the fray — and quickly. “It’s been a crazy year,” Jackson says of 2023’s extreme weather. We’re already feeling the effects of global warming, but we can seize the moment, he says. “This problem is not something for our grandchildren. It’s here.” More

  • in

    Reindeer herders and scientists collaborate to understand Arctic warming

    The spring 2014 annual reindeer festival in Yar-Sale, a rural town on the Yamal Peninsula in Western Siberia, was a grim affair. A rainstorm followed by a deep freeze the previous November had turned the normally snow-covered tundra into an ice shield. Reindeer could not paw through the thick ice to access lichen, their primary food source. In a region where winter temperatures can plunge below –50° Celsius, that ground remained frozen months later. Tens of thousands of reindeer had already died of starvation. Thousands more were on the brink of death.

    A prominent reindeer herder named Vasily Serotetto approached a group of scientists. Could they predict when such an event — known as seradt in the Indigenous Nenets language — might occur, he asked. Even a few days advance notice would have enabled mobile slaughterhouse operators to come in and humanely kill the animals. And the animal meat and fur would not have gone to waste.

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    To the scientists in attendance, the request felt like a call to action. Serotetto was basically saying: “You scientists, what’s causing this?” says Bruce Forbes, a biogeographer at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland.

    The scientists possessed a trove of satellite images of the Russian Arctic to start tackling that question, Forbes knew. But without more detailed, on-the-ground information from local inhabitants, such as the timing of the event and where it occurred, they did not know where to begin looking in that massive amount of data.

    Now the two groups have joined forces to try to understand a phenomenon that has crucial implications for a people’s way of life, as well as a world at large grappling with climate change. Besides preventing herbivores from accessing foliage underneath the ice, rain on snow has been shown to trigger slush avalanches, create surface conditions that warm permafrost, change soil and vegetation conditions and disrupt transportation and communications.

    While that paired knowledge helped unravel the many factors that caused the deadly icing in 2013, finding a way to predict such events remains a puzzle.

    Power of partnership

    The idea that Indigenous and scientific communities can help each other has been gaining prominence in recent years. Forbes is part of a group of interdisciplinary scientists involved in the Arctic Rain on Snow Study, or AROSS, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. The team is studying what causes rain on snow in the Arctic and how such events affect local wildlife, ecology and communities.

    And in September, NSF launched a research hub, the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science. That $30-million, five-year effort to bridge Western and Indigenous ways of knowing is based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

    Indigenous people, such as the Siberian reindeer herders, have a deep understanding of their local environs, says linguistic anthropologist Roza Laptander, an AROSS team member originally from the Yamal Peninsula. Laptander, of both the University of Lapland and the University of Hamburg in Germany, has periodically embedded with herding communities since 2006.

    Laptander’s research shows how ecological knowledge is encoded in the Nenets language. For instance, the first snow of the season is often soft and deep, or idebya syra, Laptander reported in September in Ecology and Society. That snow is difficult for the reindeer to walk in. Snow with ice granules, or inggyem’ syra, indicates high-quality lichen. Seradt, caused by rain falling on snow or unfrozen ground and then freezing solid, is to be feared. The word stems from serad’’, which translates to both rain and misfortune.

    Every winter, reindeer herders migrate across Western Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula in search of the animals’ main food source, lichen. Warming Arctic temperatures have increased the likelihood that rain will fall on snow, and then freezing temperatures will bury lichen under thick ice — which occurred in 2013. That winter, over 61,000 reindeer starved to death.Roza Laptander

    Historically, the herders could rely on their in-depth knowledge of varying types of snow and ice, along with an ability to read weather patterns and animal behavior, to gauge the likelihood of a difficult winter, Laptander says. But a rapidly warming Arctic is scrambling those signals. “Their traditional ways of predicting weather do not work anymore,” she says.

    Scientists, meanwhile, often look to understand how warming-fueled changes to the Arctic climate, such as thinning sea ice and melting permafrost, are affecting climate change and weather patterns on a global scale (SN: 8/31/23). Knowing where to zoom in and what to zoom in on to help local communities requires those communities’ input.

    “[Scientists] probably wouldn’t even know one type of snow is different than another. We might just look and say, ‘There’s snow here,’” says Dylan Davis, a remote sensing archaeologist at Columbia University who is not involved with this project. “Local communities and Indigenous communities that live with this every day, they’re going to be able to see things that we don’t.”

    Prediction challenges

    That’s what happened at Yar-Sale. Forbes told Serotetto that scientists might be able to sort out what caused the 2013–14 seradt, but they needed an idea of where to begin. Serotetto pointed to a map. In a typical winter, herders migrate from north to south. When the rain-on-snow event hit, many herders were already too far south to turn back or doubted the severity of the disaster. Serotetto, a herder with decades of experience, was able to push north. He discovered that the northern peninsula was relatively unscathed.

    Serotetto drew a line on the map demarcating where he had come across the edge of the ice shield. When scientists pulled up satellite images from that November day, Forbes says, “the line was exactly where he drew it.” 

    That information enabled Laptander, Forbes and others on the team to begin investigating the unique confluence of sea ice levels, snow versus ice cover on land, air temperatures and precipitation that contributed to the November 2013 icing event in southern Yamal.

    Melting sea ice in the Barents and Kara seas releases humid air into the atmosphere, the team found (SN: 11/15/16). That humid air can blow onto the land as rain when temperatures rise above freezing.

    The answer to Serotetto’s question, though, is far from resolved. Predicting such events remains extremely challenging, Forbes says. For instance, in 2018, the North Atlantic was open water all the way to the North Pole, and rain-on-snow seemed almost inevitable. But such an event did not occur. How did conditions differ between 2013 and 2018?

    Efforts to answer that question are currently on hold. First, the pandemic thwarted travel and then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Climate research in the Russian Arctic has come to a virtual standstill, Forbes says. “Suddenly, half the Arctic is a no-go.”  

    But the work in Yamal has snowballed to other Arctic regions, Forbes says. For instance, on a trip to Greenland last year, sheep farmers and reindeer herders told Forbes that they had just dealt with their first serious rain-on-snow event the previous winter. Forbes and his colleagues are hoping to apply what they learned in Yamal to better understand that event. “Now we have a data-sharing network with Indigenous informants across Arctic North America,” Forbes says. More

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    Crabs left the sea not once, but several times, in their evolution

    Most terrestrial plants and animals left the ocean a single time in their evolutionary history to live ashore. But crabs have seemingly scuttled out of the sea more than a dozen times, with at least two groups later reverting back to a marine lifestyle, a study finds.

    The research, published November 6 in Systematic Biology, sheds new light on the evolutionary history of the group Brachyura, which includes roughly 7,600 species of “true crabs,” and includes the most comprehensive evolutionary tree yet created for the group. And the study offers clues about how other early invertebrates may have evolved a terrestrial lifestyle, researchers say.

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    Unlike for well-studied animals such as birds and mammals, a unified crab tree of life has been lacking, says Kristin Hultgren, an invertebrate zoologist at Seattle University. “While the authors have developed a useful framework for understanding the complexity of transitioning to terrestrial life, one of the most important contributions is the extensive, well-dated evolutionary tree.”

    Crabs are an extremely diverse group and have colonized nearly every type of habitat on Earth. It’s been a challenge to study when crabs first shifted from one habitat to another during evolution because, like some other invertebrates, crabs don’t have the extensive fossil trail that early vertebrates do, says Joanna Wolfe, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

    Past research has also often treated marine, freshwater and land crabs as discrete subgroups when they’re more like a continuum, Wolfe says. “They’re not distinct and actually have a lot in common, and looking at them together helps trace their evolution.”

    Wolfe and her colleagues collected genetic data from 333 species of crabs in the group Brachyura. These crustaceans are evolutionarily distinct from, although closely related to, another group of crustaceans that independently evolved crablike bodies and are often erroneously referred to as crabs, including animals like the hermit and king crabs.

    The team then combined that genetic data with dozens of fossils to generate a crab evolutionary tree, layering on details about each species’ life history and adaptations for living on land to reconstruct a possible timeline of when crabs colonized drier ground.

    True crabs diverged from other crustacean lineages roughly 230 million years ago during the Triassic Period, the researchers found, refining previous estimates. Over the next hundred or so million years, brachyurans diversified widely during a period previously dubbed the “Cretaceous crab revolution.”

    The study also showed that during their evolution, crabs appear to have adapted to a more terrestrial lifestyle as many as 17 times, either by shifting from the ocean to the intertidal zone or similarly salty habitats like mangroves, or by colonizing freshwater estuaries and rivers on route to land. In at least two cases, crabs reverted to a marine lifestyle long after they’d left.

    The amount of times that crabs independently left the ocean is “astonishing,” says Katie Davis, an evolutionary paleobiologist at the University of York in England who was not involved in the research. “And it’s really fantastic that molecular biology, fossils and modern numerical techniques can be combined to provide insight into previously unanswerable questions.”

    The study also hints at what other early arthropods that ventured onto the land may have been like, Wolfe says. Past studies have shown that crabs and insects share a common, if unknown, aquatic ancestor. By looking at the types of crabs that successfully left the ocean, it’s possible to guess at what adaptations early insects might have needed to do the same. Modern crabs living out of the water today, for example, excel at keeping themselves from drying out and have limited their dependence on water for reproduction.

    “If you’re going to be the first proto-insect to come out of the ocean … you’re probably going to need those kinds of adaptations,” Wolfe says. More

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    Grassland and shrubland fires destroy more U.S. homes than forest fires

    Forest fires can devastate vast swaths of land, but in the United States, another category of conflagrations takes the title of most destructive.

    Of the homes destroyed in wildfires across the contiguous United States from 1990 to 2020, 64 percent — nearly 11,000 — were razed by grassland and shrubland fires, researchers report in the Nov. 10 Science.  

    “We often think about forest fires because that’s what we see on the news … they’re dramatic, they’re huge, they’re intense,” says ecologist Volker Radeloff of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “but grassland and shrubland fires can also be quite destructive.” For instance, the 2023 Lahaina fire on the Hawaiian island of Maui, fueled by invasive wild grasses, killed at least 98 people and destroyed some 2,200 buildings.

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    For the new study, Radeloff and his colleagues analyzed three decades of data on wildfire occurrence, land use and housing, hoping to learn more about what factors fuel such destructive blazes.

    The team found that about 337,000 square kilometers of grasslands and shrublands burned from 1990 to 2020, compared with about 144,000 square kilometers burned by forest fires. Though forest fires were about twice as likely as grassland fires to burn down homes they encountered, the much larger expanse burned by grassland and shrubland fires helped make them more destructive overall.

    The data also revealed that U.S. wildfire risk had risen substantially. Today, roughly 148,000 houses stand in areas where wildfires have burned before — that’s more than twice as many as in 1990. About half of those additional homes were built on land that had already burned prior to 1990, the team found, while the rest were already standing when a blaze burned through.

    Radeloff hopes more people will consider their wildfire risk and take steps to prepare, be that planning evacuation routes or fireproofing their homes. Evading wildfire danger, it seems, takes more than getting out of the woods. More

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    The last 12 months were the hottest on record

    The last 12 months were the hottest in 150 years of recordkeeping — and probably in the last 125,000 years — thanks to human-caused climate change, a new report finds.

    From November 2022 through October 2023, the planet’s average temperature was about 1.3 degrees Celsius higher than the average temperature from 1850 to 1900, say researchers with the nonprofit group Climate Central. That’s just shy of the 1.5-degree threshold often cited as a benchmark for avoiding irreversible impacts on the climate (SN: 1/11/22).

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    And over the past year, about 1 in 4 people around the world experienced a climate change–driven heat wave that lasted at least five days, the scientists found.

    The report, released on November 9, comes just ahead of the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, which begins on November 30. That’s intentional, says Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central. There is no doubt that fossil fuels are driving most of this heat, and it’s to be hoped that the world’s nations will take note of these findings, he says (SN: 4/4/22).

    Global average numbers can be hard to grasp. So the new report also quantifies temperatures that people around the world are actually experiencing day-to-day, and how much those are attributable to climate change, Pershing says.

    “We have these super important global numbers such as the 1.5- or 2-degree warming targets, but that isn’t the experience that people on planet Earth have,” he says (SN: 12/17/18). “We wanted to develop a way to really localize that experience … to talk about how climate change influenced that day’s temperatures on any given day anywhere in the planet.”

    To that end, the analysis used Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index, or CSI, a system first described by the organization in 2022. CSI is a daily local temperature attribution system that uses a combination of observational data and climate simulations to determine the likelihood that local temperature variations are attributable to climate change.

    Extreme heat is a relative term, dependent on both place and time. So, in this report, the researchers considered extreme heat for a given location to be daily temperatures that would have been in the 99th percentile for that place from 1991 to 2020 — temperatures, in other words, that locals would recognize as insanely hot.

    Using that index with data from hundreds of countries, states, provinces and major cities, the researchers found that about 90 percent of the world’s population, or 7.3 billion people, experienced at least 10 days of extreme temperatures in the last year that were very strongly affected by climate change.

    Those days had a CSI rating of at least 3, indicating that human-caused climate change made those temperatures at least three times as likely. Nearly 3 out of 4 people experienced over a month of those temperatures.

    The report also reveals stark inequities in the burden of climate change around the world. Earth’s least developed countries, including many nations in sub-Saharan Africa and in Southeast Asia, had a relatively high average CSI of 2, the report notes, though they have contributed the least amount of fossil fuel emissions.

    But climate impacts are also accelerating in many of the world’s richest countries, including the United States. The last 12 months saw brutal heat waves across much of the southern United States. Houston sweltered through a 22-day streak of extreme heat, where each consecutive day topped 38° C (100° Fahrenheit). That was the longest such extreme heat streak of the 700 cities examined with a population of at least 1 million people.

    The CSI analysis is similar to the analyses performed by the consortium World Weather Attribution, or WWA, which looks for the fingerprints of human-caused climate change in specific extreme events around the world (SN: 7/25/23).

    WWA examined a handful of extreme heat waves over the last 12 months, all of which were strongly attributable to climate change, says Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who has led many of WWA’s attribution studies.

    An immediate reduction of fossil fuels won’t shut off some effects of a century of emissions, including heat absorbed by the oceans or melted glaciers, Otto says. But global temperatures would stop rising, and heat waves would stop getting worse, she says. Keeping the planet below a 1.5-degree warming threshold “is in reach,” she says, “if we want it to be in reach.”

    The last 12 months saw the onset of an El Niño climate pattern, which can bring higher global temperatures on top of the longer-term global warming trend (SN: 6/15/23). But the greatest temperature impact from El Niño generally takes a year or so to develop, as the heat gets disseminated around the globe, Pershing says.

    The previous 12-month record was set from October 2015 to September 2016, as heat from a strong El Niño event spread around the globe. That record — where the global average was 1.29 degrees Celsius higher than the average preindustrial temperature — was tied earlier this year, for the period ending in September 2023.

    That means that, as the El Niño pattern continues to develop into next year, 2024 will probably smash records once again. More

  • in

    On some Australian islands, sea level rise may be helping mangroves thrive

    Some mangrove forests off Australia have flourished in the last several decades, a new study reports. And, counterintuitively, rising sea levels may be responsible.

    Off Australia’s northern coast, the skeletal remains of ancient coral reefs form the bedrock of numerous wooded islands. These low-lying tropical oases are home to diverse animals and plants, including mangrove forests that pepper their coasts and serve as vital habitat and carbon storers. A recent survey of one cluster of those islands — the first in 50 years — shows that swelling seas might have led to a massive mangrove expansion, researchers report November 1 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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    In other parts of the world, rising seas have put mangroves at risk (SN: 6/4/20). But at the Howick Islands in the Great Barrier Reef, the story is different because of its unique geologic history.

    “We usually are focusing on areas of mangrove loss,” says Temilola Fatoyinbo, a forest ecologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved with the study. “So it’s always encouraging to see areas where there’s mangrove gain.”

    Mangroves — groupings of different plants that have adapted to thrive along coastlines — soak up carbon dioxide and store it as “blue carbon,” a term for carbon that is sequestered in marine environments (SN: 9/14/22; SN: 11/18/21).

    “There’s a lot of interest in using mangrove blue carbon to mitigate climate change,” says Kerrylee Rogers, an environmental scientist at the University of Wollongong in Australia. “But there remains a lot of questions around their capacity to adapt to sea level rise.”

    In 2021, a team led by Wollongong environmental scientist Sarah Hamylton visited the Howick Islands to see how the mangroves there are coping with sea level rise. Hamylton flew a drone over the mangroves to capture aerial imagery, while others walked through the brine to assess the plant diversity and measure individual trees. Using the measured widths and heights of several mangroves, the team extrapolated tree widths for the rest of the forest from the drone’s height data to estimate the total mangrove biomass.

    The islands host nearly 54,000 metric tons of mangroves, the team estimates, which is roughly 10,000 more metric tons than was there in 1973. The forest’s reach has also expanded on many islands. While about 25 hectares of every 100 on Newton Island were covered by mangroves in 1973, for example, the forest now blankets close to 40 hectares out of 100.

    Mangrove cover on Bewick Island (pictured) has grown by 50 percent since 1973. Researchers attribute this expansion to rising sea levels, which opens new habitat for the coast-loving plants.Oxana Repina

    The Howick Islands are uniquely suited to supporting mangroves as the ocean rises. At the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, around 12,000 years ago, water levels rose around northern Australia, and coral reefs grew upward to fill the space that had opened for them. When sea levels fell thousands of years later, the exposed reefs eroded into sediment. With sea levels now rising again, the researchers suspect the mixture of saltwater and sediment makes a perfect home for the salt-tolerant mangroves (SN: 9/29/22).

    “As sea level came back down, it wasn’t suitable mangrove habitat,” Rogers says. With those parts of the island now submerged, “it now is suitable again, and it’s largely because it was set up for those conditions [2,000] to 4,000 years ago.”

    The new findings highlight the need for mangrove research on a local scale, Rogers says. “In a global model, this would get lost.” Fatoyinbo agrees. “Studies on the local scale are really useful,” she says, “to better understand big patterns.”

    Rogers and Hamylton are now working on a bigger effort to study mangroves around Australia. “If we’re going to invest in mangroves … to provide us blue carbon and to protect shorelines, we need to understand how dynamic they are,” Rogers says. “And then get some more understanding of how they’re going to adapt to sea level in the future.” More

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    Fake fog, ‘re-skinning’ and ‘sea-weeding’ could help coral reefs survive

    Erinn Muller should have reason to despair. The marine biologist studies coral health in Florida, a state whose reefs have been devastated by extreme heat, increasingly ferocious hurricanes and deadly infectious diseases (SN: 6/15/23; SN: 9/13/23; SN: 7/9/19).

    “We’ve lost 98 percent of our living coral cover,” says Muller, of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla. While among the hardest hit, Florida isn’t alone. From Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to the Caribbean, coral reefs globally are in trouble.

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    But innovative efforts to protect and restore coral reefs buoy Muller’s hopes. She just has to visit Mote’s Caribbean king crab nursery, a project of reef restoration expert Jason Spadaro. There, tiny specks of crustaceans will grow into salad-loving foragers. Once they are set loose on nearby reefs, Maguimithrax spinosissimus eat away suffocating seaweed.

    “I’m optimistic because there is really truly so much work being done” to restore coral reefs, says Tali Vardi, a marine biologist and executive director of the Coral Restoration Consortium, a global community of scientists, managers and restoration experts dedicated to helping coral reefs. While safeguarding the future of coral reefs ultimately depends on halting climate change, “we’re trying to maintain pockets of biodiversity” that can serve as a springboard for the long-term recovery of reefs.

    Given how diverse coral reefs are, Vardi says, researchers need a diversity of solutions to match. “There’s no silver bullet here.”

    Around the globe, coral biologists are trying everything from low-tech seaweed removal to high-tech artificial fog production to protect corals. Here’s a closer look at three projects that researchers are developing to help save coral reefs.

    Sea-weeding, literally

    In Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, it’s not crabs doing the weeding. It’s volunteers with Earthwatch Institute — an international environmental organization — snorkeling and diving underwater to pluck macroalgae, the weed of the sea. The volunteers’ goal is to free parts of the reef from a seaweed scourge to see if that leads to a resurgence in coral.

    “There’s been this issue with increases in macroalgae versus corals for a long time,” says David Bourne. “If something’s out of whack” with the reef ecosystem, “the corals lose out and the macroalgae take over.”

    Though they seem like a cross between plants and rocks, the hard corals that form reefs are actually giant colonies of tiny animals called coral polyps. The polyps secrete a hard skeleton made of calcium carbonate, and skeleton by skeleton, they build an undersea city. Tiny photosynthetic algae partners living inside the polyps give the corals their brilliant colors and generate energy for their hosts.

    Seaweed, however, takes up space and soaks up light that could otherwise be used by corals. If corals decline in number due to stressors like heat or disease, seaweed can quickly proliferate and take their place.

    Bourne, a marine biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, wanted to know if the seaweed-removal program being run by Earthwatch was effective. From 2018 to 2021, volunteers pruned seaweed from 24 sections of the reef — each 5 meters by 5 meters — several times per year, while leaving other seaweed-laden areas alone. In total, they removed a whopping 2,148 kilograms of seaweed.

    At the start, the tended plots had enough corals to cover only about 34 square meters. Removing macroalgae from those plots led to a total gain of nearly 203 square meters of coral cover, enough to blanket a tennis court, Bourne’s team reported September 13 in the Journal of Applied Ecology. This change wasn’t seen in the plots left unpruned.

    After volunteers removed suffocating seaweed from sections of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, coral cover expanded dramatically in just a few years. These photos show the same part of the reef in May 2019 and May 2023.Hillary Smith

    “It’s not surprising that we saw some recovery,” Bourne says. “What was surprising was the amount of recovery and how quickly it happened.” Sea-weeding is a straightforward way to skew the reef’s competitive balance and help corals thrive, he says.

    Bourne hopes the simplicity of the approach will help it spread. “The advantage of sea-weeding is it’s really low tech; anybody can do it,” he says. Plus, seaweed tends to be an issue on reefs that are close to shore and known to local communities, “so there’s active groups that are interested in helping.”

    ‘Re-skinning’ a coral skeleton

    Though it may sound macabre, the calcium carbonate skeletons of dead reefs can serve as vital scaffolding for new corals to flourish. “Re-skinning” a dead reef takes advantage of coral microfragments, small bits of coral polyps. Growing microfragments in the lab and then transplanting them onto reef skeletons can, in a way, bring a dead ecosystem back to life.

    David Vaughan discovered the restorative potential of coral microfragments through what he calls a “eureka mistake.” Vaughan, formerly executive director of Mote and now head of the nonprofit Plant A Million Corals in Summerland Key, Fla., accidentally broke off shards of a branching coral while moving it to a new tank. Some coral polyps remained on the bottom of the tank. Vaughn assumed the tiny animals wouldn’t survive. But when he checked on them about two weeks later, he saw instead that they had quickly grown and multiplied.

    Large corals grow slowly, Muller says, because they have to put a lot of energy into creating more of their calcium carbonate skeleton. If you instead affix multiple microfragments, consisting of a thin skeletal layer with a small bit of live coral tissue on top, near each other on a hard surface, they grow rapidly and fuse together. Mote scientists “hacked the biology of a lot of these slow-growing species to encourage them to put a lot of their resources into creating tissue faster,” Muller says.

    Microfragments of slow-growing corals that are placed near each other on the skeleton of a dead coral will quickly grow and merge together. Coral fragments, like these pictured at Mote Marine Laboratory, can be grown in land-based nurseries.Mote Marine Laboratory

    A 2018 study found that microfragments of the mountainous star coral (Orbicella faveolata) grew 10 times as much tissue over a 31-month period as the normal, larger fragments that were previously used for reef restoration. For every square centimeter of coral that was planted at the beginning of the experiment, microfragments grew an average of 3.38 square centimeters of new tissue, while larger fragments grew only 0.35 square centimeters. Ocean plantings of coral microfragments have since withstood disease, bleaching and hurricanes, and grown large enough to reproduce within several years.

    “Spawning after five years,” Spadaro says, “was definitely a game changer in terms of restoration.” Re-skinning with microfragments can give you functional reef ecosystems in a fraction of the time as previous methods. Mote scientists have since shared their knowledge with others working to restore corals around the world, such as in Hawaii and the Caribbean.

    Making shade

    Bleaching is the dramatic outcome of great hardship; pushed to the brink by extreme stress, a strained coral belches out its symbiotic photosynthetic algae, turning stark white and losing its primary food source. Excessive heat is the most common culprit, but it’s not the only one.

    Excess light can lead to bleaching, too, says Peter Butcherine, a biologist at Southern Cross University in Coffs Harbour, Australia. Too much light during photosynthesis, performed by the corals’ algae partners, leads to an abundance of toxic oxygen-containing molecules that are highly reactive and can cause cell death. Protecting corals from too much sun exposure can help prevent bleaching, but “you can’t roll out thousands of square meters of shade cloth” to shield an area the size of the Great Barrier Reef, Butcherine says.

    Instead, Butcherine and others have turned to a more ephemeral approach: creating fog. “It’s essentially a sea mist,” Butcherine says. Though misting the entire Great Barrier Reef isn’t feasible, marine fog could be used to protect sensitive parts of the reef during the time of day when sunlight is at its harshest.

    [embedded content]
    Too much sunlight can lead to coral bleaching, much like excessive heat can. By creating artificial marine fog using arrays of misters mounted to ships, like what’s seen in this video, researchers hope to shield reefs such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef from harmful rays.

    Butcherine and colleagues showed that shading corals for just four hours a day can delay bleaching even when water temperatures are high, such that corals could withstand three extra weeks of bleaching-level heat. The results of that laboratory study were published in the Sept. 20 Frontiers in Marine Science. This delay could help corals hold on to their algal partners until the environment around them cools.

    Because it’s still being developed, marine fogging is quite expensive; it requires large arrays of misters mounted to ships. But Butcherine is excited by the potential of using solar power, including sun-powered drones mounted with misters, to implement the technique at a wider scale, and even at other reefs around the world.

     “I’m optimistic that we can make a difference,” Butcherine says. More