Category: Environment

{Researchers discovered a new snake species in Madagascar and named it ‘ghost snake’ for its pale grey coloration and elusiveness. The researchers named it Madagascarophis lolo, pronounced ‘luu luu,’ which means ghost in Malagasy.}

Researchers discovered a new snake species in Madagascar and named it “ghost snake” for its pale grey coloration and elusiveness. They found the ghost snake on a recently opened path within the well-traveled Ankarana National Park in northern Madagascar in February 2014. They studied the snake’s physical characteristics and genetics, which verified that it is a new species. The researchers from the LSU Museum of Natural Science, the American Museum of Natural History and the Université de Mahajunga in Madagascar named it Madagascarophis lolo, pronounced “luu luu,” which means ghost in Malagasy. Their work was published in the scientific journal, Copeia, today.

The ghost snake is part of a common group of snakes called Madagascarophis, or cat-eyed snakes, named for their vertical pupils, which is often found among snakes that are active in the evening or night. Many of the cat-eyed snakes are found in developed areas or degraded forests. However, the researchers found the ghost snake on the national park’s iconic pale grey limestone Tsingy rocks.

“None of the other snakes in Madagascarophis are as pale and none of them have this distinct pattern,” said Sara Ruane, post-doctoral researcher at the LSU Museum of Natural Science and lead author of the paper.

The researchers conducted genetic analyses and were surprised to find that the ghost snake’s next closest relative is a snake called Madagascarophis fuchsi, which was discovered at a site approximately 100 kilometers north of Ankarana several years ago. Both were found in rocky, isolated areas.

“I think what’s exciting and important about this work is even though the cat-eyed snakes could be considered one of the most common groups of snakes in Madagascar, there are still new species we don’t know about because a lot of regions are hard to get to and poorly explored. If this commonly known, wide group of snakes harbors this hidden diversity, what else is out there that we don’t know about?” Ruane said.

Malagasy master’s student Bernard Randriamahatantsoa spotted the snake on the path. Randriamahatantsoa, Ruane and their collaborators discovered the ghost snake after hiking for more than 17 miles in near-constant rain from their field site to the Ankarana park entrance, whilst in search for a different species.

“It was really tough. It was a lot of work, but the payoff was big,” Ruane said. “Snakes are hard to find under the best of circumstances. They are pretty elusive.”

That’s why the researchers conduct their fieldwork during the rainy season in Madagascar when snakes and their prey, such as frogs, lizards and even other snakes, are most active.

After discovering this new species, the researchers returned to the U.S. to conduct their morphological and genetic analyses. Part of the study of the snake’s physical characteristics includes counting all of the scales on its belly, its back, counting how many scales touch the eye and the number of scales on the upper and lower lips.

Ruane extracted DNA from tissue samples from the ghost snake and the previously found Madagascarophis fuchsi. She compared three genetic markers shared across the species of Madagascarophis to determine how similar the new species was to those previously known. In addition, Ruane and her colleagues mapped the genetic family tree, or phylogeny, for the entire group of Madagascarophis, which has five species.

“All of the analyses we did supported that this is a distinct species despite the fact that we only have this one individual,” she said.

{The results of the first-ever pan-African survey of savanna elephants using standardized data collection and validation methods, has now been announced. The report confirms substantial declines in elephant numbers over just the last decade. The researchers report that the current rate of species decline is 8 percent per year, primarily due to poaching.}

Researchers have announced the results of the $7 million, three-year Great Elephant Census, the first-ever pan-African survey of savanna elephants using standardized data collection and validation methods. Managed by Elephants Without Borders (EWB,) the immense project’s report confirms substantial declines in elephant numbers over just the last decade. The researchers report that the current rate of species decline is 8 percent per year, primarily due to poaching.

The Pan-African survey shows the estimated savannah elephant population to be 352,271 within the 18 countries surveyed to-date, representing at least 93 percent of savannah elephants in these countries. For savannah elephant populations in 15 of the GEC countries, for which repeat counts were available, populations declined by 30 percent between 2007 and 2014. 84 percent of the population surveyed was sighted in legally protected areas compared to 16 percent in unprotected areas. However, large numbers of carcasses were observed in many protected areas indicating that elephants are struggling both within and outside of parks. Experts say the ivory trade and poaching pose serious threats and there is now a risk that savannah elephants could disappear from parts of Africa. The scientific report of the GEC findings was published on August 31, in the peer-reviewed open access journal PeerJ.

The GEC team used the most accurate, up-to-date counting and statistical methods to analyze data, accurately determining the number and distribution of the great majority of African savanna elephants and this now provides a baseline on a continental scale for future surveys and trend analyses, that wildlife ecologists will be able to use to coordinate conservation efforts.

Overall, 90 scientists, six non-governmental organization partners, and two advisory partners, managed by a team at Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. collaborated in the work. These included the organizations Elephants Without Borders, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Nature Conservancy, Frankfurt Zoological Society, African Parks Network and the advisory groups Save the Elephants and the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s African Elephant Specialist Group. The effort was conducted which partnered with in country park biologists, rangers, and game wardens.

The first GEC flights started in February 2014. The GEC teams flew a total of 294,517 km of transect lines to sample 218,238 square km or 24 percent of the total ecosystem area being studied. This involved 9,700 hours (406 days) in the air by 81 airplanes and 286 crew. The census has completed 18 country surveys with two countries still to be completed, organizers say. South Sudan and the Central African Republic are anticipated to be flown by the end of 2016 depending on safety conditions and data reliability.

Dr Michael Chase, the Principle Investigator on the project, said that “the results of the GEC show the necessity of action to end the African elephants’ downward trajectory by preventing poaching and protecting habitat.”

{A rare small-bodied pterosaur, a flying reptile from the Late Cretaceous period approximately 77 million years ago, is the first of its kind to have been discovered on the west coast of North America.}

A rare small-bodied pterosaur, a flying reptile from the Late Cretaceous period approximately 77 million years ago, is the first of its kind to have been discovered on the west coast of North America.

Pterosaurs are the earliest vertebrates known to have evolved powered flight.

The specimen is unusual as most pterosaurs from the Late Cretaceous were much larger with wingspans of between four and eleven metres (the biggest being as large as a giraffe, with a wingspan of a small plane), whereas this new specimen had a wingspan of only 1.5 metres.

The fossils of this animal are the first associated remains of a small pterosaur from this time, comprising a humerus, dorsal vertebrae (including three fused notarial vertebrae) and other fragments. They are the first to be positively identified from British Columbia, Canada and have been identified as belonging to an azhdarchoid pterosaur, a group of short-winged and toothless flying reptiles which dominated the final phase of pterosaur evolution.

Previous studies suggest that the Late Cretaceous skies were only occupied by much larger pterosaur species and birds, but this new finding, which is reported in the Royal Society journal Open Science, provides crucial information about the diversity and success of Late Cretaceous pterosaurs.

Lead author of the study Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone, a Palaeobiology PhD Student at the University of Southampton, said: “This new pterosaur is exciting because it suggests that small pterosaurs were present all the way until the end of the Cretaceous, and weren’t outcompeted by birds. The hollow bones of pterosaurs are notoriously poorly preserved, and larger animals seem to be preferentially preserved in similarly aged Late Cretaceous ecosystems of North America. This suggests that a small pterosaur would very rarely be preserved, but not necessarily that they didn’t exist.”

The fossil fragments were found on Hornby Island in British Columbia in 2009 by a collector and volunteer from the Royal British Columbia Museum, who then donated them to the Museum. At the time, it was given to Victoria Arbour, a then PhD student and dinosaur expert at the University of Alberta. Victoria, as a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, then contacted Elizabeth and the Royal BC Museum sent the specimen for analysis in collaboration with Dr Mark Witton, a pterosaur expert at the University of Portsmouth.

Dr Witton said: “The specimen is far from the prettiest or most complete pterosaur fossil you’ll ever see, but it’s still an exciting and significant find. It’s rare to find pterosaur fossils at all because their skeletons were lightweight and easily damaged once they died, and the small ones are the rarest of all. But luck was on our side and several bones of this animal survived the preservation process. Happily, enough of the specimen was recovered to determine the approximate age of the pterosaur at the time of its death. By examining its internal bone structure and the fusion of its vertebrae we could see that, despite its small size, the animal was almost fully grown. The specimen thus seems to be a genuinely small species, and not just a baby or juvenile of a larger pterosaur type.”

Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone added: “The absence of small juveniles of large species — which must have existed — in the fossil record is evidence of a preservational bias against small pterosaurs in the Late Cretaceous. It adds to a growing set of evidence that the Late Cretaceous period was not dominated by large or giant species, and that smaller pterosaurs may have been well represented in this time. As with other evidence of smaller pterosaurs, the fossil specimen is fragmentary and poorly preserved: researchers should check collections more carefully for misidentified or ignored pterosaur material, which may enhance our picture of pterosaur diversity and disparity at this time.”

{Plants retain more moisture in high carbon dioxide conditions, keeping water on land.}

As a multiyear drought grinds on in the Southwestern United States, many wonder about the impact of global climate change on more frequent and longer dry spells. As humans emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, how will water supply for people, farms, and forests be affected?

A new study from the University of California, Irvine and the University of Washington shows that water conserved by plants under high CO2 conditions compensates for much of the effect of warmer temperatures, retaining more water on land than predicted in commonly used drought assessments.

According to the study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the implications of plants needing less water with more CO2 in the environment changes assumptions of climate change impacts on agriculture, water resources, wildfire risk, and plant growth.

The study compares current drought indices with ones that take into account changes in plant water use. Reduced precipitation will increase droughts across southern North America, southern Europe and northeastern South America. But the results show that in Central Africa and temperate Asia — including China, the Middle East, East Asia and most of Russia — water conservation by plants will largely counteract the parching due to climate change.

“This study confirms that drought will intensify in many regions in the future,” said coauthor James Randerson, UCI professor of Earth system science. “It also shows that plant water needs will have an important influence on water availability, and this part of the equation has been neglected in many drought and hydrology studies.”

Recent studies have estimated that more than 70 percent of our planet will experience more drought as carbon dioxide levels quadruple from pre-industrial levels over about the next 100 years. But when researchers account for changes in plants’ water needs, this falls to 37 percent, with bigger differences concentrated in certain regions.

The reason is that when Earth’s atmosphere holds more carbon dioxide, plants actually benefit from having more of the molecules they need to build their carbon-rich bodies. Plants take in carbon dioxide through tiny openings called stomata that cover their leaves. But as they draw in carbon dioxide, moisture escapes. When carbon dioxide is more plentiful, the stomata don’t need to be open for as long, and so the plants lose less water. The plants thus draw less water from the soil through their roots.

Global climate models already account for these changes in plant growth. But many estimates of future drought use today’s standard indices, like the Palmer Drought Severity Index, which only consider atmospheric variables such as future temperature, humidity and precipitation.

“New satellite observations and improvements in our understanding hydrological cycle have led to significant advances in our ability to model changes in soil moisture,” said Randerson. “Unfortunately, using proxy estimates of drought stress can give us misleading results because they ignore well-established principles from plant physiology.”

Planners will need accurate long-term drought predictions to design future water supplies, anticipate ecosystem stresses, project wildfire risks and decide where to locate agricultural fields.

“In some sense there’s an easy solution to this problem, which is we just have to create new metrics that take into account what the plants are doing,” said lead author Abigail Swann, a University of Washington assistant professor of atmospheric sciences. “We already have the information to do that; we just have to be more careful about ensuring that we’re considering the role of the plants.”

Is this good news for climate change? Although the drying may be less extreme than in some current estimates, droughts will certainly increase, researchers said, and other aspects of climate change could have severe effects on vegetation.

“There’s a lot we don’t know, especially about hot droughts,” Swann said.The same drought at a higher temperature might have more severe impacts, she noted, or might make plants more stressed and susceptible to pests.

“Even if droughts are not extremely more prevalent or frequent, they may be more deadly when they do happen,” she said.

{Human occupation is usually associated with deteriorated landscapes, but new research shows that 13,000 years of repeated occupation by British Columbia’s coastal First Nations has had the opposite effect, enhancing temperate rainforest productivity.
}

Andrew Trant, a professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, led the study in partnership with the University of Victoria and the Hakai Institute. The research combined remote-sensed, ecological and archaeological data from coastal sites where First Nations’ have lived for millennia. It shows trees growing at former habitation sites are taller, wider and healthier than those in the surrounding forest. This finding is, in large part, due to shell middens and fire.

“It’s incredible that in a time when so much research is showing us the negative legacies people leave behind, here is the opposite story,” said Trant, a professor in Waterloo’s School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability. “These forests are thriving from the relationship with coastal First Nations. For more than 13,000 years –500 generations — people have been transforming this landscape. So this area that at first glance seems pristine and wild is actually highly modified and enhanced as a result of human behaviour.”

Fishing of intertidal shellfish intensified in the area over the past 6,000 years, resulting in the accumulation of deep shell middens, in some cases more than five metres deep and covering thousands of square metres of forest area. The long-term practice of harvesting shellfish and depositing remnants inland has contributed significant marine-derived nutrients to the soil as shells break down slowly, releasing calcium over time.

The study examined 15 former habitation sites in the Hakai Lúxvbálís Conservancy on Calvert and Hecate Islands using remote-sensed, ecological and archaeological methods to compare forest productivity with a focus on western red cedar.

The work found that this disposal and stockpiling of shells, as well as the people’s use of fire, altered the forest through increased soil pH and important nutrients, and also improved soil drainage.

This research is the first to find long-term use of intertidal resources enhancing forest productivity. Trant says it is likely similar findings will occur at archaeological sites along many global coastlines.

“These results alter the way we think about time and environmental impact,” he said. “Future research will involve studying more of these human-modified landscapes to understand the extent of these unexpected changes.”

The study appears today in Nature Communications.

{Researchers have created an animated map showing where mammals, birds and amphibians are projected to move in the Western Hemisphere in response to climate change.}

Scientists predict that as Earth warms and climate patterns morph in response, animals will be forced to move to survive. That usually means hightailing it to higher latitudes as equatorial areas become too hot and dry.

This movement pattern has happened fluidly and naturally in the past as climates have shifted, but now with human developments such as cities, highways and agriculture, critical animal migrations will be limited in surprising and troubling ways.

The University of Washington and The Nature Conservancy have created an animated map showing where mammals, birds and amphibians are projected to move in the Western Hemisphere in response to climate change. The visualization draws upon flow models from electronic circuit theory, taking inspiration from existing visualizations of wind flow across the U.S.

“This is the best visualization of any of these studies we’ve done. It’s much more compelling than our static maps,” said Joshua Lawler, a UW professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and lead author of the study informing this animated map. “The flow diagram really makes the data much more accessible.”

In 2013 Lawler, along with Julian Olden, a UW associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences, then UW graduate student Aaron Ruesch and Brad McRae of the Conservancy, published a landmark study in Ecology Letters that considered the likely movement patterns of nearly 3,000 species under climate change — determining which areas will be hot spots for animal migration in the coming decades and centuries.

In the U.S., they predict that the Appalachians will likely serve as a highway for species moving north. In the west, mountain ranges and protected areas will also serve as conduits, but many of the higher mountains will also serve as refuges themselves.

The researchers had created fixed maps showing species’ movement and patterns, but the data practically begged to be animated to visualize the full effect of the paper’s results, Lawler said.

They asked data whiz Dan Majka with the Conservancy’s science team to produce an animation, and in mid-August Migrations in Motion launched.

The map is color-coded to depict separate movement patterns for mammals, birds and amphibians. The animations show a mass exodus toward northern regions, with empty black zones showing where large cities or landscape features like the Great Lakes block migration. It’s important to note that each dot and subsequent streaking line show the accumulation of species’ movement, not just one animal’s future migration, Lawler explained.

The researchers were surprised to see how clearly migration routes appeared once the data were visualized. They knew from the data that the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains were important movement areas, but once the data were animated on a map, those routes popped out like well-trodden paths, Lawler said.

“It was shocking to see these features emerge so clearly. You can really see them when the data are visualized like this,” he said.

In South America, the most striking pattern is a projected movement of species west out of the Amazon, Lawler added.

The researchers plan to calculate migration shifts for species in the U.S., particularly in the western regions, at finer resolutions, then apply that information to find the places most important to protect for movement under climate change. They also hope to visualize that data.