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    10 billion snow crabs have disappeared off the Alaskan coast. Here’s why

    From 2018 to 2021, an estimated 10 billion snow crabs disappeared from the eastern Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska, with the population plummeting to record lows in 2021. Researchers had only speculated as to what happened to the missing crabs. Now, a study in the Oct. 20 Science finds that a marine heat wave probably spurred a mass die-off, in part by causing crabs to starve.

    “It’s a fishery disaster in the truest sense of the word,” says Cody Szuwalski, a fishery biologist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.

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    On average, snow crabs bring in about $150 million of annual revenue for Alaskan fisheries. In the 2021-2022 crabbing season, that revenue fell to around $24 million. With marine heat waves becoming more common because of human-caused climate change, the future of such fisheries and arctic marine ecosystems, more broadly, is uncertain, researchers say (SN: 7/13/23).

    The new research can help fishery managers anticipate and prepare for similar events such as the crab collapse in the future, Szuwalski says, particularly when it comes to getting proper disaster aid to affected fishers quickly.

    Usually, cold, arctic water makes ideal habitat for snow crabs (Chionoecetes opilio) and other crustaceans. As winter’s thick sea ice melts, the frigid meltwater settles on the seafloor, creating a cold-water pool with temperatures below 2˚ Celsius. Crabs thrive in this chilly sanctuary on the eastern Bering Sea shelf. But a marine heat wave in the region in 2018 and 2019 prevented the usual amount of sea ice from forming, and, according to yearly temperature and population survey data, the cold pool never appeared and then the crab population collapsed.

    Szuwalski and colleagues used computer models to analyze temperature data combined with population surveys, fishing catch numbers and lab experiments to look for drivers behind the sudden collapse. Two causes stood out: higher water temperatures and an initially dense crab population.

    The water temperature probably didn’t kill the crabs directly, as snow crabs in laboratories can survive in waters up to 12° C. Instead, the crabs might have starved to death, Szuwalski says.

    Data show the crab population initially boomed in 2018 — reaching historic highs — thanks to ideal ocean conditions for newborn crabs around 2010. But the crabs also occupied a smaller area than normal, though Szuwalski and colleagues are uncertain why. That means more crabs were crammed onto less space on the shelf. Then came the heat wave. Higher water temperatures can rev the cold-blooded crabs’ metabolism; previous research has shown that the calorie requirements of snow crabs in labs almost double as water temperature rises from 0° to 3° C. 

    As a result, the crowded crabs probably needed more food, but because of the smaller foraging area they had even fewer resources to sink their claws into. Compared with similar-sized crabs from the previous year, those surveyed in 2018 had lower body weights, another clue starvation played a role in the missing crabs.

    “It’s just yet another example of something we didn’t expect, but now we have to live with,” says Christopher Harley, a marine ecologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who was not involved with the research. In the eastern Bering Sea, it could take at least four years before more crabs of a fishable size start showing up, meaning fishers there will remain in a lurch.

    Such effects of marine heat waves are likely to extend beyond snow crabs. Ecosystems in northern latitudes, such as Alaska’s, are changing more rapidly in response to climate change than anywhere else (SN: 8/11/22). Scientists can typically use data from the past to help predict and prepare for changes in the future. But the future increasingly holds events that have never happened on record before — like the snow crab population collapse — so they’re harder to prepare for, Harley says.

    That’s especially true, he says, because there hasn’t been enough attention on the secondary effects of marine heat waves on cold-blooded creatures, such as higher calorie needs and the risk of starvation. More

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    A global report finds amphibians are still in peril. But it’s not all bad news

    Nearly 20 years ago, the first global assessment of amphibians found the animals facing widespread declines. Now, a second, updated report shows that many amphibians are still in trouble, but with some silver linings, researchers report October 4 in Nature.

    “We are realistic and hopeful at the same time,” says Jennifer Luedtke, a conservationist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which tracks extinction risk trends for species around the world.

    In particular, the wealth of data in the new report, which includes about 8,000 amphibian species, could help focus conservation efforts for years to come, says Luedtke, who also works from Washington, D.C., for Re:wild, a conservation organization based in Austin, Texas. That’s what happened after the first Global Amphibian Assessment in 2004, which brought awareness to the amphibian crisis and galvanized researchers to coordinate efforts.

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    Having two assessments that can be compared is a big deal, experts say. “It’s important not just to have a picture, but actually to have a sequence of pictures … where you can see what’s happening over time,” says conservation ecologist Ana Rodrigues of CNRS in Montpelier, France, who worked on the first assessment but was not involved in the second. “I’m really happy to see this done.”

    Here are five big takeaways from the new report.

    1. Amphibians remain more threatened with extinction than any other vertebrate group.

    About 41 percent of amphibian species, which include frogs, toads and salamanders, are threatened with extinction, Luedtke and her colleagues found. That’s more than any other group of vertebrates, beating out sharks and rays (37 percent), mammals (27 percent), reptiles (21 percent) and birds (13 percent).

    Amphibians held this title in 2004 too, when 39 percent of species were threatened. As part of the 2022 update, researchers also used data to reconstruct the situation in 1980. They found that even in 1980, that number was already high, at 38 percent. Basically, amphibians have been really threatened for a really long time, Luedtke says.

    The most common threat that affects amphibians is habitat loss and degradation, with agriculture affecting as many as 77 percent of the studied species. Other threats include climate change and disease, each affecting 29 percent of species. Of course, “these things are never completely isolated,” says Rodrigues, and each threat may increase the likelihood of other threats.

    2. Many of the worst amphibian declines are being caused by climate change now, instead of disease.

    Luedtke and colleagues also wanted to know which threats were most responsible for driving the worst declines. So they looked at a subset of 788 species that, between 1980 and 2022, moved down an IUCN Red List status level — for instance, from vulnerable to endangered. They found that, in 2004, disease was the primary driver behind the drop in conservation status for 58 percent of that species subset. At the time, the fungal pathogen chytrid was devastating frog populations around the world (SN: 8/23/02). Climate change, on the other hand, was a significant contributor to declines in only 1 percent of species.

    Now, less than 20 years later, climate change is behind a status drop for 39 percent of species. That makes it the most common primary driver of declines across the amphibian group, the researchers found. And still the finding is probably an underestimate, Luedtke says, as studies continue to emerge detailing how climate change–related temperature increases, changes in precipitation, extreme weather events and wildfires impact amphibians.

    “It’s very worrying,” Rodrigues says. “We’re at the beginning of climate change.… What’s ahead of us?”

    Amphibian species in the tepuis, or tabletop mountains, of Venezuela, like this Chimantá poison frog (Anomaloglossus rufulus), are particularly vulnerable to climate change, as they are unable to shift much higher in altitude to escape warming temperatures.F.J.M. ROJAS-RUNJAIC

    3. It’s bad around the world. But amphibians are doing worse in some regions than others.

    Each region faces its own set of threats. The chytrid outbreak, for example, has affected much of the world, but it hit Central and South America especially hard from the 1970s to the 2000s. That likely explains why that region contains the largest proportion of species in the IUCN Red List categories of highest concern, the researchers say. New Guinea and Africa were spared much of the devastation, though the pathogen has recently started to emerge in sub-Saharan Africa.

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    Across Europe and East Asia, habitat loss is the leading cause of decline, followed by a newly emerging fungal pathogen in Europe called Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, this time that affects salamanders (SN: 9/3/13). It hasn’t yet spread to North America, which would be disastrous, Rodrigues says. The continent is home to more than 200 types of salamanders, over a quarter of the world’s salamander species.

    For now, North America’s amphibian declines are most associated with climate change, the report found. South and Southeast Asia are seeing an improving trend among their species’ extinction risk, probably due to better management of protected areas.

    4. Scientists know a lot more about amphibians now than they did in 2004.

    One of the assessment’s few bright spots is its sheer amount of data. The update includes more than 2,000 additional species — all newly described since 2004. There was also a decrease in species labeled as “data deficient” by the IUCN, from 23 percent in 2004 to only 11 percent in 2022. By comparison, though, less than 1 percent of bird species are listed as data deficient.

    While there’s still a long way to go for amphibians, researchers are thrilled by the new amount of information. “It’s like, wow, all the knowledge!” Rodrigues says. “So that’s absolutely good news.” With more data, she says, conservation efforts can be better focused.

    This indigo bush frog (Raorchestes indigo) has moved from critically endangered to vulnerable thanks to habitat protection efforts in the Kudremukh Massif mountain range of India.Saurabh Sawant

    5. Some amphibian species have improved since 2004.

    The new report didn’t just find declines — 120 species saw their IUCN conservation status improve.

    About half of those species recovered unaided. Many of those had suffered declines due to chytrid and are now bouncing back, possibly as frogs become resistant to the pathogen (SN: 3/29/18). It’s a source of hope that “we have these little frogs evolving, in front of our eyes, resistance to chytridiomycosis,” Luedtke says.

    The other half improved thanks to conservation efforts, the report found. One of those species is India’s indigo bush frog (Raorchestes indigo), which was classified as critically endangered in 2004. A couple years later, a legal battle led to the end of all mining in the Kudremukh Massif mountain range, and the species’ IUCN status has since improved to vulnerable.

    Stories like that are evidence that effective habitat protection can make a noticeable difference, the researchers say, and yet, with most amphibians still facing declines, it’s clear that current efforts are not enough. The assessment’s accompanying State of the World’s Amphibians Report focuses on action steps based on the new findings. Among other things, it identifies 50 target conservation areas around the world — including Jamaica, Brazil’s Atlantic Forest and the Central Annamite Highlands in Vietnam — that feature a high density of threatened species.

    “Yes, the number of threatened amphibians continues to increase, but our understanding is improving,” Luedtke says. “And because we understand them better, we can act in a more accurate and effective way.” More

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    In noisy environs, pied tamarins are using smell more often to communicate

    Native to the Brazilian Amazon, pied tamarins have always used vocal calls to communicate. But noise pollution from car traffic and other human activity are forcing some tamarins to complement those voice calls with smell markings to alert others to dangers, researchers report September 20 in Ethology Ecology & Evolution.

    Most pied tamarins (Saguinus bicolor) live in Manaus, Brazil, inhabiting fragmented patches of forest scattered around urban environments. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, this small, black and whitish-yellow primate is critically endangered.

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    Vocal communication is crucial for pied tamarins’ survival; they use it to alert other individuals to danger — an important feat considering the urban environment surrounding them. “Pied tamarins have 12 different types of vocalization with several uses, from pointing to food and cuddling each other to calling out for some danger,” says Tainara Sobroza, a biologist at the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus.

    The “danger” vocalization is particularly important for these animals, Sobroza says, as many are hit by cars and killed when they cross streets to move between forest patches. “We wanted to understand if this type of vocalization is being affected by the noise of urban environments,” she says.

    Sobroza and colleagues spent about a year observing pied tamarins, which normally wander in groups of less than 10 individuals. Using radio collars, the team tracked nine groups in Manaus for 10 days each from November 2018 to December 2019. While physically following the groups, the researchers measured the loudness of the alpha female’s alert call and visually counted how often individuals rubbed their chest and lower parts on the ground and trees, spreading an odorous, waxy substance to signal which direction they were heading.

    The team thought the tamarins would use fewer vocal callings and more smell-spreading to communicate effectively between groups — but that is not what happened. Estimates of the behaviors suggest tamarins complemented one with the other: They maintained the loudness and quantity of their vocal calls while also marking the terrain with their scents.

    “It is just like being at a noisy party, and you want to call a friend that can’t hear you from the other side of the room,” Sobroza says. “Added to calling him or her, you also usually wave and do arm gestures to call the attention of that person.”

    The new observations bring extra knowledge about the ecology and behavior of this species, says Luciane Lopes de Souza, a biologist at the University of the State of Amazonas in Manaus who did not take part in the study. “It is very interesting to see that pied tamarins can adapt to use [a scent-marking] form of communication, which we see much more frequently in other species such as the squirrel monkey.”

    Human activity is changing the behavior of several species such as birds, spiders and crabs (SN: 6/26/16, SN: 7/16/03). Understanding these changes is crucial if humans want to mitigate their impacts through conservation.

    “I do hope this study goes on, as it is of extreme importance we have research like this running for longer periods,” Souza says. “This way, we can understand annual or seasonal changes in animal behavior and think of evolutionary changes they might be facing.” More

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    New computer analysis hints volcanism killed the dinosaurs, not an asteroid

    For decades, scientists have vigorously debated whether an asteroid strike or massive volcanic eruptions ended the reign of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Roughly three-quarters of all life on Earth, including all nonbird dinosaurs, went extinct at that time, putting a dramatic end to the Cretaceous Period.

    Now, researchers have devised a new way to identify the true dino killer: Let computers take a crack at it.

    The result of that computational effort suggests that massive bursts of gas produced by the Deccan Traps eruptions were solely capable of causing the extinction event, the team reports in the Sept. 29 Science. Those eruptions, which lasted roughly a million years, spewed massive amounts of gas-ridden lava across what’s now western India.

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    “Rather than come at it from the perspective of ‘let’s blame the volcanoes and explain why’ or ‘let’s blame asteroids and explain why,’” the goal was to have as little human input or bias in the process as possible, says Dartmouth computational geologist Alexander Cox.

    The idea was to work backward using evidence from the scene of the crime. Scientists do have a smoking gun: Cores drilled into deep-ocean sediments contain geologic data pointing to deadly bursts of gas to the atmosphere, particularly planet-warming carbon dioxide and ocean-acidifying sulfur dioxide.

    But such gases could have come from the asteroid strike, as it incinerated rocks on the planet’s surface, Cox says, or from the Deccan Traps eruptions.

    Previous efforts to understand the source of the gases have focused on timing, examining pulses of lava emplacement during the Deccan Traps eruptions, Cox says (SN: 2/21/19). But “we only have best guesses about how much initial gas was in [the lava].” Estimated carbon dioxide concentrations in the lava, for example, vary by an order of magnitude, he says. “So that’s why we approached this from a gas-emissions perspective rather than a lava-flow perspective.”

    Vast hardened lava flows, known as the Deccan Traps, cover much of what’s now western India. The lava is the remnant of a massive volcanic event about 66 million years ago. New computer analyses suggest that gases emitted during this event were enough to shift Earth’s temperature and may have led to the demise of nonbird dinosaurs.Baajhan at English Wikipedia

    To disentangle the relative contributions of each potential culprit, Cox and Dartmouth geologist C. Brenhin Keller used a statistical model called a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. That approach systematically considers the probability of different scenarios of gas emissions from the different sources, converging toward possible solutions as the results of the simulations move closer and closer to geologic observations.

    What made the researchers’ approach particularly powerful is that they harnessed 128 different processors to run scenarios in parallel, Cox says. “All the processors then compared how they’re doing at the end of every model run, like classmates comparing answers.” That parallel computing meant that computations that would otherwise have taken a year took only a few days.

    The observations Cox and Keller used were data collected from three cores drilled into deep-sea sediments, each spanning 67 million to 65 million years ago. In those sediments are foraminifera, ocean-dwelling microorganisms whose carbonate shells contain different isotopes, or forms, of carbon and oxygen. The shells’ chemical makeup records the ocean chemistry at the time of their formation, and so can be used as a proxy to infer past global temperatures as well as how many creatures were thriving in the oceans, and how much carbon was moving between the atmosphere, ocean and land (SN: 1/16/20).

    The computer simulations determined that the amount of gas spewed into the atmosphere from the volcanism alone was enough to account for the changes in temperature and carbon cycling determined from the foraminifera data in the drill cores.

    As for the asteroid strike, which formed the massive Chicxulub crater in what’s now Mexico, it probably did not produce a big spike in carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide, the analysis found (SN: 1/25/17).

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    But many scientists are not convinced that these findings provide the ultimate answer to this long-standing, complex question. “It’s an elegant way to address this problem,” says Sierra Petersen, a geochemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Modeling in this way “gives the freedom to find the consensus solution, taking multiple proxy records into account. However, like any model, output depends on input.”

    Petersen notes that foraminifera shells are not an ideal proxy for ancient temperatures: The oxygen isotope ratios in foraminifera shells can change not only due to temperature but also due to seawater composition. Different temperature proxies would likely lead to different patterns of gas release reproduced in models, Petersen says.

    As for the mass extinction culprit, she adds, “it’s a bit of a leap to say that this study shows the impact didn’t cause the extinction. I think what they show is that the impact was likely not associated with a large [gas] release.” But the asteroid, she says, still could have had other deadly impacts on the planet’s environment.  

    Indeed, “the Chicxulub impact led to many devastating effects beyond the carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide emissions explored in this study,” says Clay Tabor, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

    Those include massive clouds of soot and dust kicked up from pulverized rocks due to the impact, he says. Previous research has suggested this dust may have dimmed the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth by as much as 20 percent, inducing a frigid winter that swiftly killed off plants and destroyed habitats (SN: 7/17/20).

    What’s more, the new study suggests that the asteroid impact didn’t have a long-term effect on the planet’s carbon cycle, based on carbon isotope data recorded in the foraminifera shells for the million years after the extinction. But there was an abrupt drop in the abundance of those creatures corresponding to the time of the impact, Tabor says. “The rapid rate of change caused by the Chicxulub impact was likely responsible for its effects on life.”

    “Many geochemical records spanning the [extinction event], as well as this modeling work, cannot capture well the rates of change associated with the Chicxulub impact,” he says. “The impact may have released significantly less CO2 and SO2 than the Deccan Traps, but it did so almost instantaneously.” So even if the asteroid impact released fewer gases overall, Tabor says, the speediness of that release could have been devastating all the same. More

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    ‘The Deepest Map’ explores the thrills — and dangers — of charting the ocean

    The Deepest MapLaura TretheweyHarper Wave, $32

    In 2019, the multimillionaire and explorer Victor Vescovo made headlines when he became the first person to visit the deepest parts of all five of Earth’s oceans. But arguably the real star of the expedition was marine geologist Cassie Bongiovanni, the lead ocean mapper who ensured Vescovo piloted his submersible to the actual deepest depths.

    Today, only 25 percent of the seafloor is well mapped. When Vescovo set out to score his record, the exact deepest location in each ocean was unknown. Bongiovanni, Vescovo and their crew had to chart these regions in detail before each dive.

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    “Traditionally, captains never cared about the seafloor as long as it stayed far enough away from the hulls of their ships,” journalist Laura Trethewey writes in The Deepest Map. The book explores humankind’s quest to map the seafloor, framed around Bongiovanni’s adventures.

    Seafloor topography has been a big concern for militaries patrolling Neptunian frontiers with nuclear submarines and companies facilitating intercontinental communication via subsea cables (SN: 4/10/21, p. 28). In recent decades, seafloor data have become crucial to the deep-sea mining industries searching for metals needed to produce green technology.

    Satellites have revealed many of the knobs and crevices visible in the deep blue of Google Maps. But with that relatively coarse information, entire mountains can be missed. To see the seafloor in high resolution requires a sophisticated sonar system aboard a big ship that sends sound signals from the sea surface into the abyss.

    Mappers like Bongiovanni calculate depth from the time it takes for the signal to travel down and bounce back to the surface. These state-of-the-art sonar systems transform “the satellite-predicted blur into a sharp three-dimensional terrain of ripples, cracks and tears in the seafloor,” Trethewey writes. “The seafloor is ‘heard,’ rather than seen.”

    Through Trethewey’s tale, she twines stories of tagging along with scientists and ocean mappers. That includes her inaugural adventure at sea, which a crew member noted was “pretty rough for a first-timer,” as he and Trethewey clung to a doorframe in near gale force winds. On this cruise aboard research vessel E/V Nautilus, which was surveying a poorly mapped stretch of California’s coast, Trethewey (and readers) are introduced to the art and science of seafloor mapping. On this day, Trethewey learned that mapping is especially difficult — and sometimes impossible — when the ocean is angry.

    Trethewey’s insightful writing helps readers understand just why mapping the ocean — even in shallow coastal waters — is crucial to so many endeavors. She visits a remote Inuit village on the western bank of Canada’s Hudson Bay, where she joins hunters who map ever-changing coastlines for their own safety. Later, she scuba dives with archaeologists in Florida who use underwater maps to explore remnants of early human history that have been submerged for thousands of years.

    A distant, possibly unreachable goal envisions creating a complete map of the entire seafloor by the end of this decade, an effort known as Seabed 2030. Because the oceans are vast and replete with remote and dangerous places that people simply can’t or shouldn’t go, this effort will almost certainly require autonomous surface vehicles armed with sonar. Such devices are already probing the depths and sending back data.

    Staring at computer screens in a sun-filled conference room, Trethewey watches as a drone outfitted with cameras, environmental sensors and a sonar system maps a bit of seafloor off California as she sips her coffee. “The future of ocean mapping weirdly felt a lot like checking social media or doing anything else on your phone these days,” she wryly observes.

    Trethewey’s book is about more than just mapping the oceans. It’s also about what can go wrong when explorers explore. It’s hard to read The Deepest Map without being reminded of the recent implosion of the Titan submersible in the North Atlantic that killed everyone on board in June. Indeed, Trethewey describes how, during Vescovo’s first solo dive, his colleagues endured 25 minutes of apprehension-turned-alarm when they didn’t hear from him.

    She also reminds us how easily exploration can turn into exploitation. In the not-so-distant past, Europeans “discovered” the so-called New World and mapped it, Trethewey writes. Exploitation followed. Scientists and environmentalists alike are now concerned that a full, detailed map of the ocean floor might lead to the destruction of delicate, mostly unknown habitats if deep-sea miners are allowed to extract metals.

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    Trethewey envisions a different outcome. Seabed 2030’s mapping effort may help people see that “the weird, wonderful deep-sea world is not a blank space, another frontier to use up and throw away,” and should be safeguarded for scientists “to uncover our past and protect our future.”

    Buy The Deepest Map from Bookshop.org. Science News is a Bookshop.org affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article. More

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    What’s driving an increasing number of hurricanes to rapidly intensify?

    On the morning of September 5, a loosely swirling system of thunderstorms formed off the western coast of Africa. By September 6, the system had become a Category 1 storm, with maximum winds at least 130 kilometers per hour (80 miles per hour).

    Just 24 hours later, fueled by the record-warm waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, Hurricane Lee whipped itself into a Category 5 monster. In that short time span, its wind speeds doubled, to 260 kilometers per hour (160 miles per hour).

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    As the world’s oceans continue to stockpile heat from global warming, stories of such rapid intensification of tropical cyclones are becoming more commonplace, and not just in the Atlantic.

    “While all eyes are on [Hurricane Lee], [Hurricane Jova] is bombing out in the eastern Pacific,” wrote Miami-based U.S. National Hurricane Center meteorologist Eric Blake on X, formerly called Twitter, on September 6. “This was just named 36 hours ago and has exploded into a Category 4 hurricane.”

    These storms formed just weeks after Hurricane Idalia, which also rapidly intensified. Its wind speeds cranked up from about 120 kph to 209 kph (or 75 mph to 130 mph) in 24 hours. Shortly afterward, Idalia slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast.

    All of these hurricanes easily met — and some greatly exceeded — the National Hurricane Center’s definition of rapid intensification, in which a storm’s maximum sustained winds jump by at least 56 kph (35 mph) in less than a day. Such storms can leave people little time to prepare, making the hurricanes particularly dangerous to lives and property.

    Here ‘s what to know about such rapidly intensifying storms.

    A warmer ocean and atmosphere can supercharge storms

    The key ingredients to boost a storm’s power quickly are very warm ocean waters, a lot of moisture in the atmosphere and low vertical wind shear, says atmospheric scientist Philip Klotzbach of Colorado State University in Fort Collins (SN: 9/28/18; SN: 9/13/18).

    Vertical wind shear is what happens when winds at different heights in the atmosphere are moving at different speeds and in different directions. Those winds can chip away at a storm as it tries to organize into a tight swirl by pulling heat and moisture away from the storm’s center and sweeping away the upper structure of the storm.

    This year saw the onset of an El Niño phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation ocean-climate pattern, a phase that tends to bring more vertical wind shear conditions to the North Atlantic. That means that El Niño years tend to feature fewer Atlantic tropical storms (SN: 5/26/23).

    But so far in 2023, El Niño hasn’t done much to minimize hurricane formation, or dampen the storms’ power. “The first half of the season has not seen the unfavorable upper-level wind conditions in the western Atlantic that are typically observed in an El Niño year,” says Ryan Truchelut, president and chief meteorologist of WeatherTiger, a weather consulting firm based in Tallahassee, Fla. That’s true even in the Caribbean Sea, where El Niño’s shearing power tends to be strongest, Truchelut adds.

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    Generally, there’s more of a contrast in temperature between the Atlantic and Pacific ocean basins during an El Niño year — the weather pattern heats up the eastern tropical Pacific while the Atlantic stays relatively cool.  But 2023 has seen record-breaking ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Gulf of Mexico (SN: 6/15/23). While the El Niño-warmed Pacific is about 1.5 degrees Celsius above normal, parts of the Atlantic are 1 to 3 degrees C above normal.

    “Temperature contrasts drive jets,” Trechelut says, “and the lack of this contrast is likely responsible for the missing shear.”

    The extremely warm waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico set the stage — all the storms needed was a window of time with favorable wind conditions, says John Kaplan, a hurricane modeler with the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, based in Miami.  “What it really comes down to is whether the conditions for rapid intensification are favorable for even a short period of time,” he says. “If there’s a window — even if not a very long one — the system can take advantage of it. That was the case for both Lee and Idalia.”

    More storms are rapidly intensifying as Earth warms

    It certainly feels like most of the hurricanes in recent years are rapidly intensifying (SN: 8/27/20). But is that a true trend? And if it is, is it linked to climate change?

    Studies suggest that it’s not just anecdotal. In August, researchers reported that the yearly number of tropical storms around the globe that rapidly intensified just offshore (within 400 kilometers of land) increased by about three a decade over the last 40 years, from fewer than five per year in the 1980s to about 15 per year by 2020.

    Open-ocean storms, spinning far out in the big blue, showed no discernible trend, the team found. But that’s perhaps not wholly reassuring, as it’s the storms closer to shore that are most threatening to coastal populations. And a 2021 study reported that tropical cyclones have been migrating closer to the coasts since 1982.

    In 2019, another team focused on observational records of wind-speed changes over 24-hour increments. Based on those data, the researchers found that episodes of rapid intensification in tropical storms tripled from 1982 to 2009. Using climate simulations, the team researchers determined that the rapid intensification trend was strongly linked to anthropogenic human-caused climate change.

    Truchelut notes that the same team authored a 2022 study that further supported an upward trend over the last few decades, determining that a larger proportion of tropical cyclones are now undergoing rapid intensification at some point in their life cycle.

    Regional and local weather patterns — such as more frequent La Niña events (the flipside of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation pattern) — “could dampen rapid intensification trends locally,” Truchelut says. “But there is strong objective evidence that anthropogenic global warming is driving increased proportions of tropical cyclones to undergo rapid intensification worldwide.”

    Klotzbach and colleagues, meanwhile, found another fingerprint of climate change in the rapid intensification of cyclones. The researchers reported in 2022 that the increase in global sea surface temperatures correlate well with an increase in the potential intensity of tropical cyclones around the world — essentially, just how strong the winds are capable of becoming — over the last 30 years. That observed increase was particularly apparent for the most monstrous storms — those whose wind speeds increased by a whopping 93 kph (57 mph) in a single day.

    Despite the fury of Lee and Jova, their threat has largely fizzled. Hurricane Lee downgraded to a Category 3 by September 12 and curved northward; however, it’s also tripled in size, threatening Bermuda with tropical storm force winds. Hurricane Jova, meanwhile, ultimately spun harmlessly in the Pacific before weakening.

    But with the hurricane season only half over, there’s still time for all that hot water to fuel the next big ones. More

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    When discussing flora and fauna, don’t forget ‘funga’

    Fungi. They grow between toes, on bread and in the shower. But the organisms also produce food and medicine and act as ecosystem maids by decomposing dead matter — benefits that are sometimes overlooked (SN: 11/17/20). That’s why the Fungi Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to fungi education and conservation, advocates for adding “funga” to the popular phrase “flora and fauna.”

    The mushrooming movement is also backed by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which in August called for the addition of “a third ‘F’ — funga — to address the planetary challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.” More than 20 countries already use the term, including Australia, Iceland and Brazil.

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    Historically, fungi have been left out of most conservation discussions and plans, says mycologist Giuliana Furci, founder of the Fungi Foundation, which was created in Chile and is now based in the United States. While flora refers to an area’s plant diversity and fauna its animal diversity, fungi don’t fit into either category. “Fungi didn’t have a way in,” Furci says. “It’s about time they get this recognition.”

    Whether a soil mold or a mushroom on a log, fungi face the same threats as other kingdoms of life, including habitat loss and climate change. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List includes more than 200 species of fungi that are either threatened or endangered. Fungi also form essential relationships with other organisms, like gut bacteria or the roots of plants (SN: 5/25/23). That means it is paramount that fungi are considered in conservation policies, Furci says. She and two other mycologists coined the term funga in 2018 in IMA Fungus. Mycota, the ancient Greek word for mushroom, would have been more accurate, but funga seemed catchier, Furci says.

    The phrase has the potential to take off widely, says mycologist Catherine Gehring of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Using funga along with flora and fauna will be particularly powerful in nonscientist circles where the phrase could encourage interest in fungi among policymakers and the public, she says.

    “[Fungi] are super valuable,” Gehring says. “It’s great to see the movement is gaining traction.” More