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      Megafire smoke may dampen California’s nut harvests

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      Wildfires may put some of America’s favorite nuts — almonds, pistachios and walnuts — at risk.

      The flames themselves aren’t to blame, but rather the long-lasting smoke from the megafires that have been scorching the western United States, a new study suggests.

      When thick wildfire smoke blanketed California’s Central Valley in the late summer of 2020 and 2021, it blocked access to crucial sunlight. The disruption limited how much energy orchard trees stored over the winter, researchers report October 2 in Nature Plants. In the year following a megafire, some almond orchards saw up to a 60 percent decrease in nut harvests. This alerted scientists to an understudied effect of wildfire smoke in the state that produces 80 percent of the world’s almonds. More

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      An idea to save Mexico’s oyamel forests could help monarch butterflies too

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      An experiment to grow new forests in central Mexico offers hope that the crucial winter habitat for millions of migrating monarch butterflies could survive into the next century.

      When scientists decided to plant hundreds of baby oyamel fir trees (Abies religiosa) about 100 kilometers from their native habitat, they weren’t sure how many trees would survive. Today, most of the saplings are flourishing, researchers report September 17 in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. Even at an altitude of 3,800 meters, high above where the trees usually grow, almost 70 percent of the saplings survived at least three years. More

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      How tiny phytoplankton trek long distances upward in the ocean

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      It’s one of the most massive migrations on Earth: a huge biomass of tiny plankton that travel from deep in the sea toward the surface. Yet not all of those organisms have limbs to propel themselves upward. So how some of them manage to undergo such a long journey has been a mystery.

      Now, a team of researchers has shown that one species of phytoplankton has an ingenious solution: swelling to six times its original size. The process reduces its density and allows it to float upward like a helium balloon, bioengineer Manu Prakash and his colleagues at Stanford University report October 17 in Current Biology. More

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      What leads rivers to suddenly change course?

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      Shifting is in a river’s nature. But when a river breaks free of its channel and carves a new path across the landscape, devastating floods may descend upon communities with little to no warning.

      For decades, researchers have struggled to explain exactly how river channels become primed for such sudden diversions, or avulsions. A study published September 18 in Nature may have finally quelled the debate, showing how two factors work together to stage the rerouting of a river. Building on their findings, the researchers also developed a promising algorithm that can predict the new path of a river that has avulsed. More

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      Climate change fueled the fury of hurricanes Helene and Milton

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      Meteorologists have watched in awe as Hurricane Milton, churning over the anomalously warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, swiftly transformed into one of the strongest Atlantic storms on record.

      Over just 20 hours on October 7, Hurricane Milton explosively intensified from a Category 1 to a catastrophic Category 5 storm, with sustained winds of 290 kilometers per hour (180 miles per hour). The storm is expected to make landfall on the west coast of Florida either late on October 9 or early October 10 as a major Category 3 or 4 hurricane, bringing deadly storm surge and hurricane-force winds to coastal regions still reeling from Hurricane Helene just two weeks earlier (SN: 10/1/24). More

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      A transatlantic flight may turn Saharan dust into a key ocean nutrient

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      As dust from the Sahara blows thousands of kilometers across the Atlantic Ocean, it becomes progressively more nutritious for marine microbes, a new study suggests.

      Chemical reactions in the atmosphere chew on iron minerals in the dust, making them more water soluble and creating a crucial nutrient source for the iron-starved seas, researchers report September 20 in Frontiers in Marine Science.

      Dust clouds settling on the Atlantic can spawn phytoplankton blooms that support marine ecosystems, says Timothy Lyons, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Riverside. “Iron is incredibly important for life,” he says. Phytoplankton require it to convert carbon dioxide into sugars during photosynthesis. More

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      Some tadpoles don’t poop for weeks. That keeps their pools clean

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      Some tadpoles don’t poop for the first weeks of their lives. At least, that’s the case for Eiffinger’s tree frogs (Kurixalus eiffingeri), scientists report September 22 in Ecology.

      Eiffinger’s tree frogs are tiny frogs that live in Taiwan and on two Japanese islands: Ishigaki and Iriomote. The tree-dwelling amphibians lay their eggs in puny puddles, which are often nestled in plant stems, tree hollows and bamboo stumps.

      Once the tadpoles hatch, they spend their early lives in these puddles. However, in pools as small as these, there’s not a lot of water to dilute ammonia — a toxic chemical animals release when they pee or poop.

      Bun Ito and Yasukazu Okada, biologists from Nagoya University in Japan, now have uncovered the tadpoles’ secret sanitation strategy — self-induced constipation. The tadpoles store their poop in an intestinal pouch until they start to metamorphize into full-fledged frogs.

      The tadpoles of Eiffinger’s tree frogs (Kurixalus eiffingeri) spend their first few weeks of life in tiny puddles of water nestled within tree hollows and bamboo stumps.Bun Ito

      Ito and Okada raised tadpoles from four different frog species in makeshift nurseries. Once the experiment began, they moved the tadpoles to smaller cribs, plastic cases with a little more than a tablespoon of water. The team measured and compared how much ammonia each species released. They also measured the amount of ammonia each species stored in their guts.

      Eiffinger’s tree frog tadpoles released less than half as much ammonia on average than the species that released the most. And compared with two of the other species, the tadpoles kept more ammonia in their guts. The researchers note that unlike Eiffinger’s tree frogs, the other species typically lay their eggs in open ponds where ammonia is easily diluted. More

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      A hurricane’s aftermath may spur up to 11,000 deaths

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      Meghan Rosen is a staff writer who reports on the life sciences for Science News. She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology with an emphasis in biotechnology from the University of California, Davis, and later graduated from the science communication program at UC Santa Cruz. More