Smithsonian science backs Caribbean Ocean conservation: Panama will protect 54% of its oceans

Business Announcement

SMITHSONIAN TROPICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE

 

VIDEO: PANAMA, PIONERO AZUL, A SHORT VIDEO DESCRIBING HOW SMITHSONIAN SCIENCE HAS SUPPORTED PANAMA'S CREATION OF NEW MARINE PROTECTED AREAS. view more 

CREDIT: STRI (SMITHSONIAN TROPICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE)

Within the framework of the Our Ocean Conference on Mar. 2-3, 2023 in Panama City, Panama’s President Laurentino Cortizo and Minister of Environment Milciades Concepción added 36,058 square miles to the Banco Volcán marine protected area in the Caribbean. During the last two decades, researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) along with local and international collaborators have offered much of the science backing Panama’s successful proposals to create the MPA’s bringing more than 50% of its ocean waters under some form of management or protection.

Created in 2015, with 5,487 square miles, the “Banco Volcán Managed Resources Area” is an area with unique natural resources, such as deep mountain ranges and high biodiversity that includes various migratory species and protected and endangered species, all important for the health of the oceans. The proposal to expand its limits was made in response to a request from the Ministry of the Environment last year, after a review of the protected area by STRI scientist Héctor Guzmán and considering the ecological integrity of the region.

The expansion of the Banco Volcán Marine Protected Area in 2023 has not only led Panama to protect more than 54% of its territorial waters, but will also buffer climate change, protect Panama's deep-sea mountain environments, and help safeguard fauna from human interventions, including several fish and invertebrate species of high commercial value, such as the Caribbean spiny lobster (Panulirus argus). Therefore, this action will have a direct impact on the protection of an important sustainable resource for the indigenous and Afro-Caribbean coastal communities of Panama. In addition, it could maintain the connectivity of migratory routes for oceanic and marine-coastal species in the area that extends along the Caribbean coasts of Jamaica, Colombia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.

“With the protection of more than half of its seas, including extensive ocean reserves on both sides of the isthmus, Panama is not only ensuring the conservation of its marine biodiversity and the livelihoods of the people who depend on these ecosystems in the long-term, but is also positioned to lead a much more ambitious regional effort,” said STRI marine biologist and MigraMar co-founder Héctor Guzmán.

STRI has accompanied the Panamanian government with the scientific bases for the creation of new marine protected areas for almost two decades, starting with the Coiba National Park in 2004 and followed by the Las Perlas archipelago in 2007, both in coastal areas of the Pacific Ocean. In 2015, STRI led the design and scientific justification for the creation of the first two oceanic marine protected areas: Banco Volcán in the Caribbean and Cordillera de Coiba in the Pacific, helping Panama to protect 13% of its oceans. With this, the country surpassed the international Aichi target for biological diversity.

A few years later, in 2021, STRI once again supported the Panamanian government with the scientific data for the expansion of the Cordillera de Coiba marine protected area. With this action, Panama achieved a total of 37,926 square miles of marine protected areas throughout the country and met the goal of the United Nations 30x30 Initiative to protect at least 30% of its marine surface by the year 2030.

“The expansion of Banco Volcan is an essential first step for large-scale regional protection of marine biodiversity,” said STRI Director Joshua Tewksbury. “A lot more science by us and by others will be required to ensure that we do the monitoring of this massive area and ensure that specific policy interventions actually create the sustainable ecosystems we all want.”

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama, is part of the Smithsonian Institution. The Institute furthers the understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems.      

Map of Panama's extended Marine Protected Areas

 

                

Experiencing racism increases black women’s heart disease risk, BU research finds

New study shows perceived racism in employment, housing, and interactions with the police associated with 26% higher risk of coronary heart disease.

Reports and Proceedings

BOSTON UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: BU EPIDEMIOLOGIST SHANSHAN SHEEHY SAYS THE STUDY PROVIDES THE “FIRST LONGITUDINAL EVIDENCE THAT PERCEIVED RACISM IS ASSOCIATED WITH INCREASED RISK OF CORONARY HEART DISEASE.” view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY DAVID KEOUGH, CHOBANIAN & AVEDISIAN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE.

More than half of Black women in America aged 20 and older have cardiovascular diseases, according to the American Heart Association, and every year, 50,000 will die as a result. Some researchers have tied Black women’s increased risk of heart disease to genetics, others to higher rates of obesity and diabetes. A new Boston University-led study points to another key factor: experiences of racism.

A team of researchers who followed more than 48,000 Black women over 22 years found those who reported experiencing interpersonal racism in employment, housing, and in interactions with the police had a 26 percent higher risk of coronary heart disease than those who did not. The women were participants in BU’s Black Women’s Health Study, a more than 25-year effort to track the health of 59,000 women in the United States.

“This is the first longitudinal evidence that perceived racism is associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease,” says Shanshan Sheehy, a BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine assistant professor. “Racism has a real impact on the heart health of Black women.” Sheehy presented the findings at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology, Prevention, Lifestyle & Cardiometabolic Health Scientific Sessions 2023.

The research kicked off in 1997, when participants—then with a mean age of 40.5—answered a series of questions about their experiences of racism. The first set of questions aimed to get at instances of perceived discrimination and unfair treatment while job hunting or at work, when trying to rent or buy a home, or during a law enforcement stop or search. Another set looked at experiences of interpersonal racism in everyday life: whether the women felt they’d received poorer restaurant service, been looked down upon, or treated as unintelligent, dishonest, or as a threat. Throughout the next 22 years, researchers tracked the women’s wellbeing with biennial mailed and online health questionnaires. All started the study with apparently healthy hearts; by 2019, 1,947 had developed coronary heart disease.

Although the research team discovered an association between a higher probability of heart disease and self-reported experiences of racism in employment, housing, and interactions with the police, they found that racism in everyday life—at a store, in a restaurant—was not linked with an increased risk. Sheehy suspects that’s because while the different types of racism are pernicious and damaging, their relative consequences are varied. Someone discriminated against in a store, she says, may be able to draw on coping mechanisms—like talking with a friend—but missing out on a promotion or a mortgage is much harder to tune out.

“When we think about how racism impacts our health, it’s a psychosocial stressor,” says Sheehy, who’s also affiliated with the BU Slone Epidemiology Center. “It increases your blood pressure, your level of inflammation—all of these biological mechanisms increase your risk of coronary heart disease.”

In past papers, Black Women’s Health Study researchers have also shown a connection between perceived experiences of racism and obesity, reduced cognitive function, insomnia, preterm birth, and many other afflictions. Sheehy and her colleagues say one next step for the coronary heart disease research is to take a deeper dive into the impact of structural racism.

“Structural racism is real—on the job, in educational circumstances, and in interactions with the criminal justice system,” says coauthor Michelle A. Albert, American Heart Association president and a University of California at San Francisco professor of medicine. “Now, we have hard data linking it to cardiovascular outcomes, which means that we as a society need to work on the things that create the barriers that perpetuate structural racism.”

 

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Other study coauthors are Julie R. Palmer, BU Slone Epidemiology Center director and Karin Grunebaum Cancer Research Professor, Medicine; Yvette C. Cozier, a BU School of Public Health associate professor of epidemiology; Lynn Rosenberg, an SPH professor of epidemiology; and Max Brock, a Cook County Health cardiologist.

Pregnant patients with anxiety have altered immune systems

Peer-Reviewed Publication

WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE

The immune system of pregnant women with anxiety is biologically different from that of pregnant women without anxiety, according to new research from Weill Cornell Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Columbia University Irving Medical Center investigators.

The study, published Sept. 14 in Brain, Behavior and Immunity, demonstrates that pregnant women with anxiety have higher levels of certain immune cells known as cytotoxic T cells; these cells attack infected or otherwise compromised cells within the body. Women with anxiety also showed differences in the activity of immune markers that circulate in the blood. This is the first known study to evaluate the relationship of anxiety to the trajectory of immune changes over the course of pregnancy and the postpartum period.

“Women with anxiety appear to have an immune system that behaves differently from that of healthy women during pregnancy and after delivery,” said principal investigator Dr. Lauren M. Osborne, vice chair for clinical research for the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine, who conducted the research while on Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s faculty. “During pregnancy, a delicate dance is supposed to occur, in which the immune system changes so that it does not reject the fetus but is still strong enough to keep out foreign pathogens.”

This study could encourage better treatment of anxiety in pregnant patients, said Dr. Osborne, who is also a reproductive psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. As a clinician, she finds that women with anxiety may resist taking antianxiety medications because they fear the drugs will hurt the baby, despite evidence that they are compatible with pregnancy.

Anxiety during pregnancy, which is self-reported by more than 20 percent of people, according to the researchers, is already known to be detrimental to the parent and child. For example, it can increase the risk of preterm birth and a lower newborn birth weight.

For this study, Dr. Osborne and her colleagues assessed a group of 107 pregnant women, 56 with anxiety and 51 without anxiety, during their second and third trimesters and at six weeks postpartum. The researchers evaluated blood samples for immune activity and conducted psychological evaluations to detect clinical anxiety.

They found that in the women with anxiety, levels of cytotoxic T cells were elevated during pregnancy and then decreased in the weeks following childbirth. In women without anxiety, the activity of these cells declined in pregnancy and continued to decline after birth.

The researchers also observed that the activity of largely pro-inflammatory cytokines, or substances secreted by cells as part of the immune system response, was suppressed during pregnancy in women with anxiety and then rose after childbirth, while healthy women exhibited the opposite pattern. 

“The takeaway is that this is the first clear evidence that immune activity differs for pregnant women depending on their anxiety status.  Knowing that there is immune system involvement is a first step toward understanding the biological factors related to anxiety in pregnancy, and a first step toward developing new treatments,” said Dr. Osborne. “We know that anxiety needs to be treated to ensure healthy outcomes for both mother and child.”

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JOURNAL

Brain Behavior and Immunity

More evidence that sugary drinks cause weight gain

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

 

IMAGE: PROFESSOR VASANTI MALIK view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

A review of dozens of studies from the last decade, led by researchers at the University of Toronto and Harvard University, recently found that sugar-sweetened beverages promote weight gain in children and adults.

The review, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, is the largest and most thorough analysis to date of research on sweetened drinks, and overweight and obesity — both of which heighten risks for diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and other diseases.

Vasanti Malik led the study, with colleagues in Toronto and Boston. Malik is an assistant professor of nutritional sciences at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine and the Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition. She spoke with writer Jim Oldfield about the findings, and take-aways for public policy and personal health.

Why do this study now?

Our last meta-analysis on this topic was 2013. You want to update a meta-analysis every five to 10 years anyway, but especially in this area because there has been so much new research the last decade. Evidence has continued to accumulate showing associations among sugar-sweetened beverages, or SSBs as we call them, and weight and chronic disease. And it’s very important to have an updated synthesis of that evidence, especially for public policy. The Canada Food Guide is clear on the need to limit SSBs and recommends water as the drink of choice, and added sugar intake including SSBs has declined in Canada, in part due to public policies. But levels here are still too high. As well, the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans are arguably not as strong, and with U.S. policymakers coming together soon to discuss the 2025 guidelines, our study will be an important piece of evidence to inform their work. 

What did your study show?

We expected to find a positive association between SSBs and weight gain, among adults and children, and in cohort studies and randomized clinical trials. And that was exactly what we found. We analyzed 85 studies, which totalled over half a million participants. In cohort studies, which follow people over long periods of time, each serving-per-day increase in SSBs was associated with a 0.42-kg (almost one-pound) higher body weight in adults. In children, we saw a 0.07-unit higher body-mass index (just under one-twelfth of a BMI unit). Perhaps most striking, findings from our dose-response analysis showed that weight gain increases with increasing levels of SSB intake, in both children and adults. A dose-response relationship provides strongevidence for a cause-and-effect relationship.  

How much weight gain might one drink a day lead to over time?

Well, we estimated that associated change in body weight over a one-year period. For adults, one additional 12-ounce serving a day was linked to a 0.20-kg higher body weight (about half a pound) in one year. Over 10 years, that could be about five pounds. In children, we observed a 0.03-unit higher BMI for each additional daily serving of SSBs over a one-year period. Although these results may seem modest, weight gain is a gradual process, with adults averaging about one pound (0.45 kg) of weight gain per year. So, limiting SSB consumption could be an effective way to prevent age-related weight gain. Limiting SSB intake among children is also an important strategy to help them develop healthy lifestyle habits and weight trajectories.

How common is excess consumption of these drinks?

It’s very common. Sugar-sweetened beverages include sodas, fruit drinks, sports and energy drinks, and they are the largest source of added sugar in the North American diet. Moreover, the rise in consumption of these drinks has mirrored the epidemic of overweight and obesity. In 2016, almost two billion adults were estimated as having overweight and 650 million had obesity. Even more worrying, the rate of increase in obesity in children and adolescents is now greater than in adults. The prevalence of childhood obesity has increased more than four-fold globally since the 1970s, which is truly alarming.

What are some of the health effects of SSBs?

A typical 12-ounce serving of an SSB contains over 140 calories and more than eight teaspoons of sugar. That nearly reaches the recommended daily limit for added sugar, which is no more than 10 per cent of total calories, or about 200 calories for a 2000-calorie per day diet. These drinks are sugar in liquid form. They’re usually made with table sugar, high-fructose corn syrup or other sweeteners that provide calories, and are digested rapidly, more so than sugar consumed as a solid. This bolus of glucose increases blood sugar levels, which triggers a glycemic response that over time can lead to insulin resistance and diabetes. The fructose component also floods the liver, which can cause lipogenesis (creation of fat), which puts a person on the path to fatty liver and metabolic disease. Fructose also increases uric acid, which contributes to insulin resistance and risk for cardiovascular and other diseases. Insulin spikes from the glycemic response can result in an appetite cascade and over-eating, as can excess insulin in the blood over longer periods. Some evidence shows that SSBs activate the dopaminergic reward system in the brain and encourage addictive behaviour, and that they alter the gut microbiome, but we need more research on those effects.

Are you optimistic, given these effects and the research evidence?  

Intake levels of SSBs have come down in the developed world. We’re still seeing increases in the developing world, but taxes in some of those countries are working. Thailand introduced a tax that has reduced consumption, as has Mexico and South Africa. At least 85 countries now have a tax on SSBs, which in part reflects the World Health Organization’s stand on this issue. In Canada, Newfoundland introduced a tax recently, and several U.S. regions and cities have had a tax for years, in response to public health efforts, more awareness and advocacy. The general effect of these taxes is reduced intake, and the revenues can be put toward further public health measures and health care. Other changes will help in Canada and elsewhere as well, such as limiting marketing to children, and better front-of-pack and nutrition labels. All these efforts will push intake down, but it’s important to remember that as that happens, people need access to clean, safe drinking water as an alternative. That’s an ongoing challenge globally, and in many parts of Canada, that we really need to address.

Vasanti Malik holds a Canada Research Chair in Nutrition and Chronic Disease Prevention at the University of Toronto, and an adjunct position in Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Michelle Nguyen, a doctoral student at U of T, conducted the study analysis and wrote the paper.

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JOURNAL

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

DOI

10.1016/j.ajcnut.2022.11.008 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Meta-analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and weight gain in children and adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies and randomized controlled trials

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

20-Dec-2022

COI STATEMENT

Vasanti Malik has received funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program; Connaught New Researcher Award, University of Toronto; the Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition, University of Toronto; Temerty Faculty of Medicine Pathway Grant, University of Toronto; Canada Foundation for Innovation; and Ontario Research Fund and has served as a consultant for the City and County of San Francisco for litigation related to health warning labels on Sugar-sweetened beverages.

New MIT Sloan research finds Americans are more receptive to counter-partisan messages than previously thought

The study, which looked at how Democrats and Republicans react to persuasive messaging that doesn't align with their party leader’s position, challenges the view that party loyalty distorts how Americans process evidence and arguments.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MIT SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

 

IMAGE: THE STUDY, BY MIT BEHAVIORAL RESEARCHERS BEN M. TAPPIN, ADAM J. BERINSKY, AND DAVID G. RAND, WHICH LOOKED AT HOW DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS REACT TO PERSUASIVE MESSAGING THAT DOESN'T ALIGN WITH THEIR PARTY LEADER’S POSITION, CHALLENGES THE VIEW THAT PARTY LOYALTY DISTORTS HOW AMERICANS PROCESS EVIDENCE AND ARGUMENTS. view more 

CREDIT: MIT SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

Party loyalty and partisan motivation may interfere less with Americans’ thinking than previously believed, MIT behavioral researchers Ben M. Tappin, Adam J. Berinsky, and David G. Rand report in new research published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

 

The study, which looked at how Democrats and Republicans react to persuasive messaging that doesn't align with their party leader’s position, challenges the view that party loyalty distorts how Americans process evidence and arguments.

 

“Our results are clear and unequivocal: Learning the in-party leader’s position on an issue certainly did influence partisans’ attitudes — but it did not cause the partisans to ignore or discount arguments and evidence that ran counter to the leader’s position,” said Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor and Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

 

Rather, respondents seemed to integrate the leader cues and the countervailing persuasive messages as “independent pieces of information” in determining whether they agreed or disagreed with various policy issues, he said.

 

Evidence versus cues from the left and right

 

The study was conducted in September 2021 and more than 5,000 American partisans — Republicans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 or Democrats who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 — completed a survey spanning 24 policy issues including affirmative action, assisted suicide, the death penalty, estate tax, foreign aid, tariffs on Chinese imports and restrictions at the US border, among others.

 

In the study, respondents gave their opinions on several of the policy issues on a seven-point scale running from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” Before giving their opinion, they were either shown a cue about the position of their party leader on the issue; a message with arguments and evidence that went against their leader’s position; both the cue and the message; or neither the cue nor the message.  

 

For instance, some respondents were asked whether the military should be allowed to use techniques such as waterboarding to gain information from a suspected terrorist. For those respondents who were Trump-voting Republicans and were assigned to see a persuasive message, they then read a paragraph that cited a 2014 Senate report in which the CIA concluded that such techniques rarely provided reliable intelligence or got suspects to cooperate. The message concluded, “The question then becomes: is it worth violating international law by torturing people — who are effectively innocent until proven guilty by a jury — for mainly useless information? The answer is No. America is better than that.” 

 

This particular example contradicted Trump’s position that such techniques are justified. In 2017, Trump said he believes waterboarding works, stating, "We have to fight fire with fire." Critically, informing respondents that Trump supports waterboarding did not cause them to ignore or discount the persuasive message. 

 

In fact, exposure to the message caused respondents to shift their attitudes towards the message, and this attitude change was a similar size even when they knew that their favored party leader took the opposite position. This pattern of results was consistent across a wide range of policy issues, as well as across demographic groups and different types of partisan cues.

 

“We found no evidence that countervailing cues from favored party leaders meaningfully diminished partisans’ receptivity to persuasive arguments and evidence — in contrast to what one would expect if party loyalty distorted partisans’ information processing,” said Tappin, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT Sloan and lead author on the study.

 

“These findings contrast with the notion that party loyalty overrides people’s values and interferes with, distorts, or otherwise limits their processing of counter-partisan messages,” added Rand. “If such interference and distortion does occur, our findings suggest that it is relatively minor, uncommon or may be avoided with ease.”

 

Not blinded by party loyalty

 

The authors noted that their results highlight a distinction between two key questions in political psychology: to what extent do party cues influence people’s attitudes, and why do they exert their influence? While there is relative consensus on the first question — party cues reliably influence people’s attitudes, sometimes by a great deal — the second question remains unsettled. Their new paper found that party cues are influential not because of blind loyalty to the party leader, but rather because they contain useful information (which is then weighed against countervailing information).

 

The range of issues and arguments in the latest study was larger than previous work but, by necessity, still limited; the authors write that different persuasive messages containing alternate arguments and evidence might have produced different results. They also point out that in their study the party leaders’ positions were not supported by justifications and talking points from the partisan media, as they often are in the real world. 

 

The researchers believe that the messages might have worked by appealing to people’s values and identities other than those of their party — and that party loyalty could not override the relevance of these other factors. “People have various identities and motivations that are not reducible to their party,” Tappin concluded.

 

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41562-023-01551-7 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Partisans’ receptivity to persuasive messaging is undiminished by countervailing party leader cues

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Mar-2023

Uncovering the voice of toothed whales: A distinct nasal structure helps produce diverse sounds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)

Toothed whales like dolphins, orcas, and sperm whales produce their diverse repertoire of sounds through a distinct structure in the nasal passages, but in a way that is strikingly similar to the way terrestrial animals use the larynx or syrinx for vocalization. In a new study, researchers who employed four different techniques to get to the bottom of how these animals make the sounds they do describe this novel sound production system and show how it enables toothed whales to use different vocal registers for echolocation and communication. To date, vocal registers have been confirmed only in humans and crows. Odontocetes (toothed whales) navigate and hunt prey in deep, dark marine environments using echolocation, a strategy that relies on the producing short, rapid and powerful ultrasonic echolocation clicks, which for some species can approach a blistering 200 decibels in volume – just shy of the loudest sounds ever recorded. In addition, toothed whales can produce an acoustically rich collection of grunts, bursts, and whistles used to compose complex vocalizations used for social communication. While its thought that these sounds are created through an airflow-driven sound source called the phonic lips located in the nose, the mechanisms that enable such complex sound production, particularly at depths hundreds of meters below the surface, remain largely unknown. Using a combination of interdisciplinary methods that past studies have lacked – including in vivo imaging and recording in trained whales, novel in vitro laboratory experiments, and techniques used to study sound variation in the human voice – Peter Madsen and colleagues show that odontocete sounds are produced through the nasal passages in a way that is functionally analogous to laryngeal and syringeal sound production in other terrestrial vertebrates, like humans and birds. According to the authors, where laryngeal sound would be hampered by pressure and minimal respiratory air volume, passing air through the nasal passage allows complex sounds to be generated at depths these animals frequent. Madsen et al. also discovered that toothed whales use different vocal registers, namely vocal fry, chest, and falsetto voice, to generate the fundamentally different tones used for echolocation and vocal communication. In a related Perspective, Andrea Ravignani and Christian Herbst discuss the study in greater detail.

**This paper is related to an Annual Meeting Briefing for Science, titled “Uncovering the voice of toothed whales: a distinct nasal structure helps produce diverse sounds,” to be held on March 2nd at 9:00 am US ET. You can access the briefing virtually here if you are registered for the AAAS Annual Meeting. (Please add briefing link to your calendars).

NOTE: If you’d like to attend this and other briefings at the 2023 Annual Meeting and have not yet registered, please do so by March 1st [Register Here. At the Registration Access Code step, please enter PRESS.]**

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JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adc9570 

ARTICLE TITLE

Toothed whales use distinct vocal registers for echolocation and communication

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Mar-2023

Toothed whales catch food in the deep using vocal fry

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN DENMARK

 

VIDEO: CAPTION: DEPLOYMENT OF A SOUND RECORDING TAG ON THE SOUND PRODUCING NOSE OF A SPERM WHALE. CREDIT LINE: PER G. HENRIKSEN, AARHUS UNIVERSITY view more 

CREDIT: PER G. HENRIKSEN, AARHUS UNIVERSITY, DENMARK.

Dolphins and other toothed whales are large brained top predators that captivate our imagination; they are extremely social, they cooperate, and can hunt prey down to 2 km deep in complete darkness with echolocation.

All these remarkable behaviors are mediated using sound that travels far and fast in murky and dark waters. However, it has remained a mystery how these amazing animals make their rich vocal repertoires in the deep.

Now a new study in the prestigious journal Science reports that toothed whales evolved an air-driven nasal sound source that operates at different vocal registers like the human voice.

The study was led by Professor Coen Elemans, voice scientist at the Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark and Professor Peter Madsen, whale biologist at the Department of Biology, Aarhus University in Denmark.  

The study shows that toothed whales, like humans, have at least three voice registers; the vocal fry register (also known as creaky voice, which produces the lowest tones), the chest register (which is our normal speaking voice) and the falsetto register (which produces even higher frequencies).

“Vocal fry is a normal voice register that is often used in American English. Kim Kardashian, Kate Perry and Scarlet Johannsen are well-known people using this register”, Professor Elemans says.

According to the new research, toothed whales use this vocal fry register to produce their echolocation calls to catch prey.

“During vocal fry, the vocal folds are only open for a very short time, and therefore it takes very little breathing air to use this register”, Elemans adds.

“And this air-economy makes it especially ideal for echolocation”, says Professor Madsen, adding:

“During deep dives, all air is compressed to a tiny fraction of the volume on the surface”.

Toothed whales dive as deep as 2.000 meters and catch more fish than the human fishing industry. When they hunt in the deep and murky waters, they produce short, powerful, ultrasonic echolocation clicks at rates up to 700 per second to locate, track and catch prey.

“Thus vocal fry allows whales access to the richest food niches on earth; the deep ocean”, says Madsen.

“While vocal fry may be controversial in humans and may be perceived as everything from annoying to authoritative, it doubtlessly made toothed whales an evolutionary success story”, Elemans adds.

It was previously thought that toothed whales make sounds with their larynx just as other mammals, but 40 years ago it became clear that this is not the case; they somehow use their nose to produce sound. In the new study, the Danish research team has uncovered, what exactly goes on using high-speed video through endoscopes:

The toothed whales have evolved an air-driven sound production system in their nose, that functions physically analogous to laryngeal and syringeal sound production in mammals and birds – but its location is far from the same.

“Evolution has moved it from the trachea into the nose, which allowed much higher driving pressures – up to 5 times what a trumpet player can generate - without damaging lung tissues”, says Madsen.

“This high driving pressure allows toothed whales to make the loudest sounds of any animal on the planet,” Elemans adds.

At depths over 100m, whale lungs collapse to avoid compression sickness and are thus no good for air supply, and the remaining air is found in the nasal passages of the skull. This provides a small, but sufficient airspace to produce echolocating sound at astonishing depths of 2000 meters.

When echolocating, toothed whales pressurize air in their bony nose and lets it pass structures called phonic lips that vibrate just as human vocal folds. Their acceleration produces sound waves that travel through the skull to the front of the head.

In addition to echolocation, toothed whales make a huge array of sounds for their complex social communication.

“Some species, like killer and pilot whales, make very complex calls that are learned and passed on culturally like human dialects”, says Madsen.

In their study the researcher show that these sounds are made by the phonic lips vibrating in the chest and falsetto registers. They filmed the phonic lips using several different approaches, using both trained dolphins and animals in the wild that were moving freely with a small tag that recorded their sounds. The in vivo recordings were done at Dolfinarium Harderwijk in Holland.

“It took us close to 10 years to develop new techniques, gather and analyze all our data”, says Elemans.

Porpoise fish capture [VIDEO] | EurekAlert! Science News Releases

                        Infographic explaining how toothed whales produce sound.

CREDIT

Mikkel Larris, University of Southern Denmark

Caption: Scan of the sound producing nose of a harbor porpoise showing parts of the two sound sources, and the fatty melon that conducts sound into the water. Credit line: Christian B. Christensen, Aarhus University

CREDIT

Christian B. Christensen, Aarhus University

Voice registers M012 human [AUDIO]

Voice registers M012 killer wh [AUDIO] | 

voice registers M012 bottlenos [AUDIO] | 

JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.adc9570 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Toothed whales use distinct vocal registers for echolocation and communication

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Mar-2023

Study reveals record-high carbon dioxide emissions from boreal fires in 2021

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (AAAS)

Boreal fires, which typically account for 10% of global fire carbon dioxide emissions, contributed 23% in 2021, a new study reports. “Boreal forests could be a time bomb of carbon, and the recent increases in wildfire emissions we see make me worry the clock is ticking,” said study author Steven Davis, who will participate in an embargoed briefing on this study this week. Extreme wildfires – which impact the climate through the carbon dioxide they emit – have become more common. Wildfires in tropical forests have received notable attention for their emissions, while fires in boreal forests have attracted much less focus. This is despite the fact boreal forests are the world's largest land biome, and fires in these regions release 10 to 20 times more carbon per unit of area burned than other ecosystems. Monitoring fire emissions in this high-carbon density ecosystems is thus critical for understanding Earth’s temperature and risks to climate mitigation efforts.

Satellite-based approaches to monitoring carbon dioxide emissions from fires can miss emissions from little fires, while bottom-up modeling approaches can miss burning soil fires. Also, carbon dioxide is hard to pinpoint to fires specifically; it can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, meaning background carbon dioxide concentrations are quite high compared to the carbon dioxide emissions released from small fires. To better monitor fire emissions, and in boreal regions in particular, Bo Zheng and colleagues used a new approach to track fire carbon dioxide emissions indirectly. It involved monitoring carbon monoxide, which has a much shorter lifetime in the atmosphere compared to carbon dioxide. The authors used satellite data from MOPITT (Measurements Of Pollution In The Troposphere instrument), the satellite instrument with the longest continuous time series of carbon dioxide measurements to date, to estimate global weekly fire carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide emissions in boreal regions through an atmospheric inversion system approach. This revealed a two-decade trend of expanding summer fires in boreal forests since 2000 and record-high emissions from boreal forest fires in 2021, coinciding with severe heatwave, drought, and high water deficit in boreal regions that year. “Our data analysis implies a link between the extensive boreal fires and climate drivers (especially temperature increase or heatwaves),” they write. They note that boreal ecosystems could become the dominant source regions of intensive fires and fire carbon emissions in the future. They also say the approach they developed to monitor fire emission estimates will be useful in developing a more integrated system capable of monitoring and evaluating global and regional fire carbon budgets, postfire land-use fluxes, and the net impact of fire emissions on atmospheric carbon dioxide.

**This paper is related to an Annual Meeting Briefing for Science, titled “Study reveals record-high carbon dioxide emissions from boreal fires in 2021,” to be held on March 2nd at 10:00 am US ET. You can access the briefing virtually here if you are registered for the AAAS Annual Meeting (Please add briefing link to your calendars).

NOTE: If you’d like to attend this and other briefings at the 2023 Annual Meeting and have not yet registered, please do so by March 1st [Register Here. At the Registration Access Code step, please enter PRESS.]**

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JOURNAL

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.ade0805 

ARTICLE TITLE

Record-high CO2 emissions from boreal fires in 2021

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Mar-2023