It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, November 28, 2020
The smell of cooperation
Research team with the University of Göttingen finds effect of odour on helpfulness in rats
NORWAY RATS (RATTUS NORVEGICUS), LIKE MOST SPECIES OF RAT, ARE VERY SOCIABLE AND COOPERATE TO HELP EACH OTHER OUT view more
CREDIT: MANON SCHWEINFURTH
Despite their reputation, rats are surprisingly sociable and actually regularly help each other out with tasks. Researchers at the Universities of Göttingen, Bern and St Andrews have now shown that a rat just has to smell the scent of another rat that is engaged in helpful behaviour to increase his or her own helpfulness. This is the first study to show that just the smell of a cooperating individual rat is enough to trigger an altruistic and helpful response in another. The research was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
It is well known that rats will help each other out. What the researchers wanted to know was whether the rat's odour during this behaviour had any effect on another rat's helpfulness. They therefore carried out a series of tests to study the importance of the scent of a rat while making cooperative decisions. The rats being studied could choose to help another rat by pulling a platform containing a reward towards the other rat's cage. This provided food for the other rat but did not have any immediate benefit for them personally. The researchers then provided the test rats either with the smell of a rat that was being helpful to another rat in a different room or with the smell of a rat that was not engaged in helpful behaviour. The researchers were surprised to find that just the scent of a rat engaged in helpful behavior was enough to illicit helpful behaviour in the other.
Dr Nina Gerber from the Wildlife Sciences at the University of Göttingen, who led the research, says: "Test rats increased their own helping behaviour when they were presented with the smell of a helpful rat. Remarkably, this holds true even though they did not experience this helpful behaviour themselves." She goes on to say, "Furthermore, such a 'smell of cooperation' depends on the actual activity of helping and is not connected to an individual rat. There isn't a "special smell" for certain nice rats: the same individual can release the scent of being helpful or not, depending solely on their behaviour."
The researchers concluded that physical cues - such as smell - might be even more important for rats to encourage cooperation than actual experiences. Gerber adds, "Even though people do not seem to rely on communication through scent in the way rats do, some studies indicate that scent is key for finding partners, or that smelling certain chemicals can increase trust in others. Whether there is such a 'smell of cooperation' in humans, however, would be an interesting question for future studies."
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Original publication: Gerber N et al "The smell of cooperation: rats increase helpful behaviour when receiving odour cues of a conspecific performing a cooperative task", Proceedings of the Royal Society B DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2020.2327
IMAGE: IMAGE OF 41P/T-G-K OBTAINED WITH THE 70-CM AZT-8 TELESCOPE ON OBSERVATION STATION LISNYKY OF THE ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORY OF TARAS SHEVCHENKO NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF KYIV (UKRAINE) OF 25 APRIL 2017.... view more
CREDIT: FEFU PRESS OFFICE
Astrophysicists from Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) joined the international research team for explaining the difference in the results of observation of the comet 41P/ Tuttle - Giacobini - Kresak. Researchers believe that data obtained by three independent teams are complementary and its complex analysis helps to unravel the mystery of dust chemical composition of comet 41P and other conundrums of the Universe. A related article appears in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The activity of comets is more complex than it appeared to be, one of the research outcomes says. The chemical composition of a cometary coma (gas-dusty environment of the nucleus) is able to change very rapidly, literally during the day. That is because of the Sun affects the nucleus of a comet approaching.
Researchers all over the Globe try to get data on the chemical composition of comets via analyses of the light refracted by its dust particles. However, the information about the color spectrum of comets differs every time, depending on different observation epochs and different phase angles (angle Earth-comet-Sun).
The present research paper postulates the controversial data sets obtained due to different sets of photometric filters and areas (apertures) of research are steady.
"At least three groups of researchers who observed comet 41P in 2017 came up with different results. The comet color ranged from red to blue. We have explained in detail why this happened", Anton Kochergin says", one of the authors of the study, a young scientist at FEFU. "Usually, the final color is normalized by taking into account the different bandwidths of the photometric filters applied. However, in many studies, the color of celestial bodies is interpreted independently of a particular set of photometric filters. We show that this is not valid for all cases. The reason the comet color differs is exactly sets of various photometric filters. In addition, the choice of the size of the calculation area, i.e. aperture, is of great importance. This is a certain radius around the cometary coma in the pictures from observatories, which scientists define as an area of research. Having decided on the aperture, they analyze only the signal inside this field".
The choice of the aperture determines which processes and results are included in the analysis. For example, a gas from a diatomic carbon molecule (C2): there are parent molecules (called CHON particles in the literature), which become a source of C2 upon photodissociation. This dissociation occurs at a certain distance from the comet's nucleus, which in turn depends on the comet's distance from the Sun. With the right aperture chosen, one can exclude most of the signals that C2 molecules give focusing on analyses of the dust component of the coma.
Dr. Kochergin emphasized that the opposite data about the color of the comet, collected by different groups using different sets of photometric filters, only benefits the researchers. It is impossible to give a thorough description of the color (the color is directly related to the chemical composition of the dust of a cometary coma), and the chemical composition after just one observation. It is necessary to observe and determine the characteristics in dynamics. The more measurements made, the more accurate the conclusions are.
"In practice, this allows us to probe into the microphysical properties of cometary dust, and the processes run in a cometary coma. With such information, we will shed light on the evolutionary processes of the Solar system. Many scientific groups around the world are working inside this fundamental area", explains Anton Kochergin.
Scientists were able to model the results of color measurements of comet 41P, receives almost simultaneously via different photometric filters in different locations. Although the blue color was gained in one case and the red in the other, the researchers found that both results were consistent with the actual behavior of cometary dust particles in coma 41P. One can copy these results via simulating light scattering by dust particles of the pyroxene mineral. Pyroxene is a silicate material that is part of the lunar soil and was also delivered from the asteroid Itokawa and discovered in the comet 81P / Wild 2. Pyroxenes are a part of cometary matter and are well studied in laboratories.
Researchers to further cooperate in observing celestial bodies from different Earth locations. The routine helps to catch up with the object under investigation in case of adverse weather conditions at the location of one of the observatories. This also brings additional data in the case of different sets of filters applied by different teams. In the observation schedule of the international collaborators, all comets and asteroids their gear is capable of tracing.
The present results became possible due to the collaboration of scientists from Astronomical Observatory, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Humanitas College, Kyung Hee University (South Korea), Space Science Institute (USA), Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Main Astronomical Observatory of National Academy of Sciences, School of Natural Sciences, Far Eastern Federal University, Ussuriysk Observatory of the Institute of Applied Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Previously, FEFU astrophysicists teamed up with Russian and foreign colleagues to observe the ATLAS comet, which disintegrated when approaching the Sun. They brought up a conclusion that carbon found in the nucleus of the comet would help to determine the age of comets in the Solar system.
IMAGE: A SEGMENT OF FIBER CORD THAT HAS BEEN WRAPPED WITH TURKEY FEATHERS, ALONG WITH A SINGLE DOWNY FEATHER. view more
CREDIT: WSU
PULLMAN, Wash. -- The ancient inhabitants of the American Southwest used around 11,500 feathers to make a turkey feather blanket, according to a new paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. The people who made such blankets were ancestors of present-day Pueblo Indians such as the Hopi, Zuni and Rio Grande Pueblos.
A team led by Washington State University archaeologists analyzed an approximately 800-year-old, 99 x 108 cm (about 39 x 42.5 inches) turkey feather blanket from southeastern Utah to get a better idea of how it was made. Their work revealed thousands of downy body feathers were wrapped around 180 meters (nearly 200 yards) of yucca fiber cord to make the blanket, which is currently on display at the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding, Utah.
The researchers also counted body feathers from the pelts of wild turkeys purchased from ethically and legally compliant dealers in Idaho to get an estimate of how many turkeys would have been needed to provide feathers for the blanket. Their efforts show it would have taken feathers from between four to 10 turkeys to make the blanket, depending on the length of feathers selected.
"Blankets or robes made with turkey feathers as the insulating medium were widely used by Ancestral Pueblo people in what is now the Upland Southwest, but little is known about how they were made because so few such textiles have survived due to their perishable nature," said Bill Lipe, emeritus professor of anthropology at WSU and lead author of the paper. "The goal of this study was to shed new light on the production of turkey feather blankets and explore the economic and cultural aspects of raising turkeys to supply the feathers."
Clothing and blankets made of animal hides, furs or feathers are widely assumed to have been innovations critical to the expansion of humans into cold, higher latitude and higher elevation environments, such as the Upland Southwest of the United States where most of the early settlements were at elevations above 5,000 feet.
Previous work by Lipe and others shows turkey feathers began to replace strips of rabbit skin in construction of twined blankets in the region during the first two centuries C.E. Ethnographic data suggest the blankets were made by women and were used as cloaks in cold weather, blankets for sleeping and ultimately as funerary wrappings.
"As ancestral Pueblo farming populations flourished, many thousands of feather blankets would likely have been in circulation at any one time," said Shannon Tushingham, a co-author on the study and assistant professor of anthropology at WSU. "It is likely that every member of an ancestral Pueblo community, from infants to adults, possessed one."
Another interesting finding of the study was the turkey feathers used by the ancestral Pueblo people to make garments were most likely painlessly harvested from live birds during natural molting periods. This would have allowed sustainable collection of feathers several times a year over a bird's lifetime, which could have exceeded 10 years. Archeological evidence indicates turkeys were generally not used as a food source from the time of their domestication in the early centuries C.E. until the 1100s and 1200s C.E., when the supply of wild game in the region had become depleted by over-hunting.
Prior to this period, most turkey bones reported from archaeological sites are whole skeletons from mature birds that were intentionally buried, indicating ritual or cultural significance. Such burials continued to occur even after more turkeys began to be raised for food.
"When the blanket we analyzed for our study was made, we think in the early 1200s C.E., the birds that supplied the feathers were likely being treated as individuals important to the household and would have been buried complete," Lipe said. "This reverence for turkeys and their feathers is still evident today in Pueblo dances and rituals. They are right up there with eagle feathers as being symbolically and culturally important."
In the long run, the researchers said their hope is the study will help people appreciate the importance of turkeys to Native American cultures across the Southwest.
"Turkeys were one of the very few domesticated animals in North America until Europeans arrived in the 1500s and 1600s," Tushingham said. "They had and continue to have a very culturally significant role in the lives of Pueblo people, and our hope is this research helps shed light on this important relationship."
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Study shows minimal impact of APPs on ED productivity, flow, safety, patient experience
IMAGE: US NATIONAL EMERGENCY MEDICINE GROUP: 13,024,216 VISITS, 105,863 EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT DAYS, 94 GENERAL EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS, AND 19 STATES. view more
DES PLAINES, IL -- Advanced practice providers (APPs) have lower productivity compared with emergency department physicians, seeing fewer and less complex patients and generating less relative value units per hour, and having no apparent impact on patient satisfaction and safety metrics. That is the conclusion of a study to be published in the November 2020 issue of Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM), a journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM). This is the first known study to examine the impact of ED APP staffing on productivity, flow, safety, and experience
The lead author of the study is Dr. Jesse Pines, the national director for clinical innovation at US Acute Care Solutions (USACS) and a professor of emergency medicine at Drexel University, Philadelphia. In this role, he focuses on developing and implementing new care models including telemedicine, alternative payment models, and also leads the USACS opioid programs.
The study suggests that advanced practice providers can be effectively integrated into EDs with staffing models accounting for the lower productivity of advanced practice providers compared to physicians with no apparent negative impact on ED flow, clinical quality, or patient experience. Greater levels of advanced practice provider coverage appear to allow physicians to care for higher?acuity cases while also allowing advanced practice providers to care for a lower, but significant number of patients requiring hospital admission and other critical care services.
While advanced practice providers are currently utilized primarily for low?acuity cases, the finding of advanced practice providers independently evaluating critically ill ED patients suggests the potential for enhanced use of advanced practice providers in EDs. However, advanced practice provider use did not result in economies of scale given the higher productivity of physicians even when accounting for their similarly higher salary.
Academic Emergency Medicine, the monthly journal of Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, features the best in peer-reviewed, cutting-edge original research relevant to the practice and investigation of emergency care. The above study is published open access and can be downloaded by following the DOI link: 10.1111/acem.14077. Journalists wishing to interview the authors may contact Stacey Roseen at sroseen@saem.org.
ABOUT THE SOCIETY FOR ACADEMIC EMERGENCY MEDICINE
SAEM is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization dedicated to the improvement of care of the acutely ill and injured patient by leading the advancement of academic emergency medicine through education and research, advocacy, and professional development. To learn more, visit saem.org.
Four-and-a-half billion years ago, Earth would have been hard to recognise. Instead of the forests, mountains and oceans that we know today, the surface of our planet was covered entirely by magma - the molten rocky material that emerges when volcanoes erupt. This much the scientific community agrees on. What is less clear is what the atmosphere at the time was like. New international research efforts led by Paolo Sossi, senior research fellow at ETH Zurich and the NCCR PlanetS, attempt to lift some of the mysteries of Earth's primeval atmosphere. The findings were published today in the journal Science Advances.
Making magma in the laboratory
"Four-and-a-half billion years ago, the magma constantly exchanged gases with the overlying atmosphere," Sossi begins to explain. "The air and the magma influenced each other. So, you can learn about one from the other."
To learn about Earth's primeval atmosphere, which was very different from what it is today, the researchers therefore created their own magma in the laboratory. They did so by mixing a powder that matched the composition of Earth's molten mantle and heating it. What sounds straightforward required the latest technological advances, as Sossi points out: "The composition of our mantle-like powder made it difficult to melt - we needed very high temperatures of around 2,000° Celsius."
That required a special furnace, which was heated by a laser and within which the researchers could levitate the magma by letting streams of gas mixtures flow around it. These gas mixtures were plausible candidates for the primeval atmosphere that, as 4.5 billion years ago, influenced the magma. Thus, with each mixture of gases that flowed around the sample, the magma turned out a little different.
"The key difference we looked for was how oxidised the iron within the magma became," Sossi explains. In less accurate words: how rusty. When iron meets oxygen, it oxidises and turns into what we commonly refer to as rust. Thus, when the gas mixture that the scientists blew over their magma contained a lot of oxygen, the iron within the magma became more oxidised.
This level of iron oxidation in the cooled-down magma gave Sossi and his colleagues something that they could compare to naturally occurring rocks that make up Earth's mantle today - so-called peridotites. The iron oxidation in these rocks still has the influence of the primeval atmosphere imprinted within it. Comparing the natural peridotites and the ones from the lab therefore gave the scientists clues about which of their gas mixtures came closest to Earth's primeval atmosphere.
A new view of the emergence of life
"What we found was that, after cooling down from the magma state, the young Earth had an atmosphere that was slightly oxidising, with carbon dioxide as its main constituent, as well as nitrogen and some water," Sossi reports. The surface pressure was also much higher, almost one hundred times that of today and the atmosphere was much higher, due to the hot surface. These characteristics made it more similar to the atmosphere of today's Venus than to that of today's Earth.
This result has two main conclusions, according to Sossi and his colleagues: The first is that Earth and Venus started out with quite similar atmospheres but the latter subsequently lost its water due to the closer proximity to the sun and the associated higher temperatures. Earth, however, kept its water, primarily in the form of oceans. These absorbed much of the CO2 from the air, thereby reducing the CO2 levels significantly.
The second conclusion is that a popular theory on the emergence of life on Earth now seems much less likely. This so-called "Miller-Urey experiment", in which lightning strikes interact with certain gases (notably ammonia and methane) to create amino acids - the building blocks of life - would have been difficult to realise. The necessary gases were simply not sufficiently abundant.
Study in Thailand identifies benefits of community-based freshwater fish reserves
Results of research published in science journal Nature could help freshwater fisheries worldwide
IMAGE: FIELDWORK IN COMMUNITIES OFTEN RESULTS IN CURIOUS ONLOOKERS, PRESENTING A GREAT OPPORTUNITY FOR INCLUSION AND AWARENESS RAISING. HERE TWO REGULAR OBSERVERS HELP AARON KONING RELEASE A RADIO-TAGGED MAHSEER AS PART... view more
CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO.
RENO, Nevada - Freshwater fish reserves are extraordinarily successful at protecting multiple species of fish, a new study of a network of community-based reserves in Thailand has found.
Aaron Koning, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Nevada, Reno's Global Water Center, spent seven years studying a network of freshwater protected areas (fish reserves) that communities established in one branch of the Salween River Basin in northern Thailand.
He mapped more than 50 reserves, all community organized and managed independently of government support, throughout the river and its branches. The area supports more than 40 species of fish, ranging from large minnows to catfish to needlefish. The results are published today in the scientific journal Nature in the article "A network of grassroots reserves protects tropical river fish diversity."
"The conservation benefits of each reserve established independently by local Pgagayaw, or Karen, indigenous communities are remarkable, and the collective benefits for fish within the entire network of reserves are even greater," Koning said. "Twenty-seven years ago, one community created a reserve in an effort to protect their fish, and since then reserves have spread among communities throughout the valley. It's a great story of effective community-based resource management."
Koning worked with a team of scientists who he had known from his work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: Martin Perales from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Etienne Fluet-Chouinard, now from Stanford University, and aquatic conservation ecologist and Associate Professor Peter McIntyre of Cornell University.
"During six weeks of fieldwork related to this study, Martin and I lived with friends in riverside villages, but made the 90 minute drive to Mae Sarieng for internet access on a couple of weekends."
They bounced around the study area of the 50-mile-long Mae Ngao River in a 1999 Toyota Hilux 4X4 truck, through the various regions and communities, including teak forests and upland agricultural areas with rice paddies and soybean crops.
"When I initially started documenting the locations of reserves several years ago, I tried to find the locations of as many reserves within the basin as I could by exploring every road and trail on the map, and many that weren't on any map," he said. "For our fish surveys, we selected a set of 23 reserves distributed throughout the river basin that broadly represented all of the reserves. While there are probably 40 species within this river valley, in this study we regularly observed 33 species of fish."
Intensive fisheries have reduced fish biodiversity and abundance in aquatic ecosystems worldwide. No-take reserves have become a cornerstone of marine ecosystem-based fisheries management. The team used the knowledge gained from decades of study on marine reserves to test if the same principles of success might apply to this network of riverine reserves, where one might not think reserves would work.
"The applicability of this marine reserve network paradigm to riverine biodiversity and inland fisheries remains largely untested," Koning said. "Our research shows that freshwater reserves created by 23 separate communities in Thailand's Salween basin have dramatically increased fish richness, density and biomass when compared to adjacent areas. One river reserve is 1,000 feet long and just 12 feet wide in dry season, but you can see fish everywhere."
Underwater fish surveys were done using masks and snorkels with lots of crawling over and around rocks underwater. In many reserves, the abundance and size of fish seeking protection was evident by eye from the river bank in the dry season.
McIntyre, now Koning's colleague in this research, was once his doctoral advisor at the University of Wisconsin, and co-advisor for his postdoctoral work at Cornell. McIntyre said he was shocked that the reserves worked so well.
"When you see piles of fish in each of these reserves, it is clear that something big is happening," he said. "Questions remain about whether the fish populations are viable in the long run, and how durable the governance approach will prove, but this unique experiment in conservation still has much to teach us."
Despite their small size, grassroots reserves enhanced the species richness, density and biomass of protected fish communities enormously. Relative to adjacent fished areas with comparable water depth and substrate composition, reserves held 27% more fish species; 124% higher fish density and an astounding 2,247% higher biomass on average.
"Our results demonstrate that small reserves have great benefits for intensively harvested fishes in this tropical river, even though their collective area encompasses only 2% of the channel in our study catchment," Koning said. "The area of individual reserves ranged from just a half acre up to six acres."
"One of the most important findings is that the network of reserves adds benefits beyond those arising from any single reserve," McIntyre said. "Another key lesson is that communities have the power to protect the resource themselves, in a way that doesn't prevent them from using it intensively outside of the reserve boundary."
This study demonstrates that fish reserves can work well in subsistence fisheries targeting rivers, thereby offering a model for protecting fish biodiversity and offsetting overfishing in rivers worldwide. The study is especially timely given that overharvest of fisheries threatens thousands of species and the food security of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
"Freshwaters are under-represented among the world's protected areas, and our findings suggest that networks of small, community-based reserves offer a generalizable model for protecting biodiversity and augmenting fisheries as the world's rivers face unprecedented pressures," Koning said.
In Southeast Asia, riverine reserves are commonplace; hundreds of communities have designated no-fishing zones that together form de facto reserve networks in rivers throughout the region.
The idea has the potential to be a big step forward in terms of freshwater biodiversity protection, not just in Thailand but worldwide. These results and the model could be applied in freshwater ecosystems worldwide - including highly diverse and highly threatened tropical rivers such as the Amazon, Congo and Mekong Rivers.
McIntyre echoed Koning's take on the potential for worldwide implementation.
"Aaron's findings offer a great model for other parts of the world, "he said. "The role of cultural traditions and governance structure can't be overstated, so we do not expect simplistic transferability. However, many of the principles identified could be applicable to subsistence fisheries elsewhere."
Koning is currently a postdoctoral researcher working with Zeb Hogan and based at the University of Nevada, Reno's Global Water Center in the College of Science.
Koning and Hogan, an aquatic conservation ecologist, along with Sudeep Chandra, the Director of the Global Water Center at the University of Nevada, Reno will be replicating the Thailand study on Cambodian rivers as part of their Wonders of the Mekong project, a comprehensive approach to fish conservation, economics and cultural values.
CAPTION
Spawning events along the Mae Ngao River one branch of the Salween River Basin in northern Thailand occur in January. Even though some of the reserves are small in size, the fish seem to live their entire life cycles there
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The Wonders of the Mekong Project, a partnership with the Inland Fisheries Research and Development Institute of Cambodia with funding from U.S. Agency for International Development, is led by Hogan. They conduct applied research, working to build capacity and develop outreach and communications products to highlight the economic, ecological, and cultural values of biodiversity and ecosystem services associated with the Lower Mekong River. The Wonders project will be building on the findings of this Mae Ngao River study. A short video describes the research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6dlDy90J74&feature=youtu.be
Community conservation reserves protect fish diversity in tropical rivers
ITHACA, N.Y. - Prohibiting fishing in conservation reserves is a common strategy for protecting ocean ecosystems and enhancing fisheries management. However, such dedicated reserves are rare in freshwater ecosystems, where conservation efforts generally piggyback on the protection of terrestrial habitats and species.
Now, a collaboration between researchers from Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found that small, community-based reserves in Thailand's Salween River Basin are serving as critical refuges for fish diversity in a region whose subsistence fisheries have suffered from decades of overharvesting.
The team's paper, "A Network of Grassroots Reserves Protects Tropical River Fish Diversity," published Nov. 25 in Nature.
The lead author is Aaron Koning, a former postdoctoral fellow with the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno. The project was overseen by Pete McIntyre, the Dwight Webster Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow and associate professor of natural resources and environment at Cornell University.
Freshwater ecosystems across the world have experienced rapid species declines compared to ecosystems on land or in the ocean. One of the leading causes is overfishing, particularly in regions where fish are a vital source of human nutrition.
Koning launched his work in Thailand as a doctoral student with McIntyre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with the goal of testing whether the benefits documented from marine conservation reserves might also apply to freshwater systems. Both researchers came to Cornell in 2018 and continued to work on the project with their collaborators at UW-Madison.
They focused on the Mae Ngao River along Thailand's border with Myanmar, because Southeast Asia has an unusually long history of freshwater conservation reserves. In 2012, Koning began documenting more than 50 reserves spread over 1,000 square kilometers of the river valley. Each of these reserves had been created by a local community to support its own nearby fishing grounds.
"It was really striking to see this largely uncoordinated effort of grassroots actors who pursued this fascinating conservation strategy of their own volition, and they keep doing it because they can see the benefits in their catches," Koning said. "That really motivated me to ask the questions: Why does this work and could it work elsewhere?"
The researchers surveyed fish communities in 23 separate reserves that ranged in length from 300 meters to 2 kilometers. Compared to adjacent areas where fishing is unrestricted and intense, the grassroots reserves contained on average 27% more fish species and 124% higher fish density, with a more than twentyfold increase in overall biomass.
"Generally, we think of rivers as systems where things flow through and fish move around constantly, so what effect could a small reserve possibly have?" Koning said. "But just having a few hundred meters where people aren't fishing, while they're fishing like crazy everywhere else, can consistently produce these big changes."
One of the key characteristics for successful reserves was location. When reserves are placed within view of local villages, the community members can enforce conservation rules and deter poachers.
"Residents can literally see the large fish from their homes - it's pretty compelling," McIntyre said.
Fish longer than 20 centimeters (approximately 8 inches) were almost entirely restricted to the reserves, and larger reserves saw the biggest bump in fish diversity and size. Community members reported that having the reserves over time helped them to catch larger fish. This indicates the reserves not only protect biodiversity but can also bolster the food security of local populations, especially during the dry season when farmers have collected their crops and turn to subsistence fishing to supplement their families' diets.
"As if the local benefits were not amazing enough, we were fascinated to see a further benefit of having other reserves nearby. These fish populations appear to be linked, yielding synergistic gains when the ad hoc network of reserves allows exchange among protected areas," McIntyre said.
The team's findings aligned with the theoretical predictions made by marine conservation models, which led the researchers to suspect the grassroots reserves could be a successful strategy for other regions that have been overharvested, such as in the Mekong, Amazon and Congo rivers, where intensive fisheries feed millions of people.
"This is a great example of communities engaging in conservation on their own, and being successful," Koning said. "If we can take that reality, mix it with what we already know from marine systems, then maybe we can marry these things and design a system of small reserves that maximize conservation benefits while improving fishery benefits for communities, too."
Koning is now working with Zeb Hogan, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Nevada-Reno who hosts the National Geographic network program "Monster Fish," to study this conservation approach at larger scales in the Mekong River basin.
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The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mustard Seed Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, in addition to the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.
New study explains important cause of fatal influenza
It is largely unknown why influenza infections lead to an increased risk of bacterial pneumonia. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now described important findings leading to so-called superinfections, which claim many lives around the world every year. The study is published in the journal PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and can also contribute to research on COVID-19.
The Spanish Flu was an influenza pandemic that swept across the world in 1918-20 and unlike many other pandemics disproportionately hit young otherwise healthy adults. One important reason for this was so-called superinfections caused by bacteria, in particular pneumococci.
Influenza is caused by a virus, but the most common cause of death is secondary bacterial pneumonia rather than the influenza virus per se. Pneumococcal infections are the most common cause of community-acquired pneumonia and a leading global cause of death. A prior influenza virus infection sensitizes for pneumococcal infections, but mechanisms behind this increase susceptibility are not fully understood. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now identified influenza-induced changes in the lower airways that affect the growth of pneumococci in the lungs.
Using an animal model, the researchers found that different nutrients and antioxidants, such as vitamin C and other normally cell protective substances leak from the blood, thereby creating an environment in the lungs that favours growth of the bacteria. The bacteria adapt to the inflammatory environment by increasing the production of the bacterial enzyme HtrA.
The presence of HtrA weakens the immune system and promotes bacterial growth in the influenza-infected airways. The lack of HtrA stops bacterial growth.
"The ability of pneumococcus to grow in the lower airways during an influenza infection seems to depend on the nutrient-rich environment with its higher levels of antioxidants that occurs during a viral infection, as well as on the bacteria's ability to adapt to the environment and protect itself from being eradicated by the immune system," says principal investigator Birgitta Henriques Normark, professor at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet.
The results provide valuable information on how bacteria integrate with their environment in the lungs and could be used to find new therapies for double infections between the influenza virus and pneumococcal bacteria.
"HtrA is an enzyme, a protease, which helps to weaken the immune system and allows pneumococcal bacteria to penetrate the protective cell layer on the inside of the airways," explains the paper's first author Vicky Sender, researcher at the same department. "A possible strategy can therefore be use of protease inhibitors to prevent pneumococcal growth in the lungs."
It is still not known if COVID-19 patients are also sensitive to such secondary bacterial infections, but the researchers think that similar mechanisms could potentially be found in severely ill COVID-19 patients.
"It's likely that acute lung inflammation, regardless of cause, gives rise to leakage of nutrients and antioxidants, and to an environment that fosters bacterial growth," says Professor Henriques Normark.
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The study was financed with grants from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, Region Stockholm, the National Technological University (Singapore), the National Research Foundation Fellowship (Singapore), the National University of Singapore, ESCMID, BioMS and the National Medical Research Council. There are no declared conflicts of interest.
Publication: "Capillary leakage provides nutrients and antioxidants for rapid pneumococcal proliferation in influenza-infected lower airways". Vicky Sender, Karina Hentrich, Anuj Pathak, Alicia Tan Qian Ler, Bethel Tesfai Embaie, Susanna L. Lundström, Massimiliano Gaetani, Jan Bergstrand, Rei Nakamoto, Lok-To Sham, Jerker Widengren, Staffan Normark, and Birgitta Henriques-Normark. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, online 23 November 2020, doi: 10.1073/pnas.2012265117.
The invasive species that Europe needs to erradicate most urgently are identified
Species such as the golden apple snail are putting the agricultural sector in the Ebro river basin in quite a predicament. Meanwhile, in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula, water hyacinths are threatening to destroy the natural ecosystem of the Guadiana River. Invasive species change not only the habitat of many other species but they also directly impact the region's economy. Some of these species are already wreaking havoc on certain areas but others could do so in the future and have a huge impact, both environmentally and financially.
In order to help management centers and administrations make decisions, an international team of European researchers, led by the University of Newcastle and the Belgian Nature and Forests Agency with which the University of Córdoba collaborated, assessed the priority of erradicating different invasive species in Europe. One of the new aspects they also included is a study of possible scenarios regarding invasive species that are not currently present in the region or that are in an emerging stage, for which there are still opportunities to curb their spread.
"It would be ideal to erradicate all the invasive species but financial and labor resources are limited, even more so now, when we are dealing with other priorities", explains researcher Pablo González Moreno, an expert on invasive species and a member of the ERSAF (Assessment and Restoration of Farming and Forest Systems) group at the University of Córdoba, who collaborated on the study, researching the feasibility of erradicating different invasive plant species.
One of the species identified as a very high priority is the common myna from the starling family that has been able to establish small colonies in Spain and Portugal and that, due to its aggressive territorial nature and ability to adapt, could spread to more areas and displace other native species. Other very high priority species for Europe are the Berber toad, the ring-tailed coati (a carnivorous mammal) and the red-vented bulbul, another bird species.
Among the species that have yet to arrive in Europe but that could in the future, the highest priority is for the rusty crayfish (Faxonius rusticus), a freshwater crayfish that is causing serious problems in the northern US and Canada. Also a priority are the northern snakehead (Channa argus), an Asian fish that came to the US via collectors who had purchased them, and Cryptostegia grandiflora, a kind of vine native to Madagascar.
In order to draw up this list, the international team first analyzed the risk of establishment, spreading and the impact of different invasive species. This research was previously published and financed by the European Union. This risk ranking was compared to an assessment of erradication strategies for these species in terms of effectiveness, cost, level of acceptance by different social sectors, estimated time needed to act and possibility of the species coming back after being erradicated.
Having analyzed feasibility, the team met up to pool their assessments and together drew up a list of invasive species already established in Europe, as well as those who could do so in the future, according to their priority, supplying data on the regions where they are found or could be found, the erradication method, their effectiveness and their minimum and maximum cost, among other things. This is an open access list and any person or entity can consult it.
In this aspect, this study is important, not only in helping to manage the invasive species currently found in Europe, but also in having a future management scenario in case these species are able to get to Europe.
At a European level, this research has been able to create a network of researchers partnering up with managers in several European countries. "This is a way for the collective to get in touch with each other and to reach consensuses on the degree of management, something that was proving difficult to do in Europe. Having European regulations is an important step. Invasive species don't understand what borders are", concludes researcher Pablo González.
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Olaf Booy, Pete A. Robertson, Niall Moore, Jess Ward, Helen E. Roy, Tim Adriaens, Richard Shaw, Johan Van Valkenburg, Gabrielle Wyn, Sandro Bertolino, Olivier Blight, Etienne Branquart, Giuseppe Brundu, Joe Caffrey, Dario Capizzi, Jim Casaer, Olivier De Clerck, Neil E. Coughlan, Eithne Davis, Jaimie T. A. Dick, Franz Essl, Guillaume Fried, Piero Genovesi, Pablo González-Moreno, Frank Huysentruyt, Stuart R. Jenkins, Francis Kerckhof, Frances E. Lucy, Wolfgang Nentwig, Jonathan Newman, Wolfgang Rabitsch, Sugoto Roy, Uwe Starfinger, Paul D. Stebbing, Jan Stuyck, Mike Sutton-Croft, Elena Tricarico, Sonia Vanderhoeven, Hugo Verreycken, Aileen C. Mill. Using structured eradication feasibility assessment to prioritize the management of new and emerging invasive alien species in Europe.Global Change Biology. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15280
