Gauging groundwater

The largest assessment of global groundwater wells finds many are at risk of drying up

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA

Research News

 

IMAGE: A WELL IN AN ARID REGION. view more 

CREDIT: UC SANTA BARBARA

"Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water." It's a silly rhyme, but one that highlights a simple fact: Humans have long relied on wells -- such as the one on the hill visited by Jack and Jill -- for their primary drinking water supply.

Although the number of people who draw their water by pail is declining as pumps become ever more widespread, groundwater wells still supply drinking water to more than half of the world's population and sustain over 40% of irrigated agriculture. But this vital resource underfoot often gets overlooked.

UC Santa Barbara assistant professors Debra Perrone and Scott Jasechko have compiled the most comprehensive assay of groundwater wells to date, spanning 40 countries that collectively account for half of all global groundwater pumping. Their study, the cover story of the April 23 edition of the journal Science, offers an unprecedented account of the world's groundwater resources.

"We analyzed construction records for tens of millions of groundwater wells around the world," said Jasechko, of the university's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, "and the big take home is that many wells are at risk of running dry." Up to one in five wells in their survey, to be exact.

"These groundwater wells are used to withdraw water for household use or irrigation," added Perrone, a faculty member in the Environmental Studies Program. "Our study is the first time that groundwater wells and water level observations have been stitched together like this, providing local insights at the global scale."

Reaching these conclusions required the better part of six years' work by Perrone and Jasechko. The researchers culled their data from more than 100 unique databases around the world, sometimes in different formats and languages.

The first step involved compiling roughly 39 million records of functional groundwater wells that included depth, purpose, location and construction date. Rather than delegate processing the data to an algorithm or AI, the researchers carefully went through tidying it up manually. "We wanted to be sure we understood the limitations and nuances for each database we analyzed," Jasechko said.

With the data sorted, the authors compared the depths of local water tables against well depths. They found that 6 to 20% of the wells in their global sample were at risk of running dry if water levels continue to decline by just a few meters. They sought to find trends in the depths of new wells compared to existing wells in a given area from 1950 through 2015. While newer wells tended to be deeper than older ones, the trend was not ubiquitous, they said. Functional wells were not getting substantially deeper in many of the areas they surveyed.

The researchers then pulled data from roughly 1.1 million monitoring wells, which provide measurements of groundwater levels and conditions. These records supplied not only an account of where the water table lay, but also how much it fluctuated over the course of the year. Seasonal variation, they found, was typically within one meter.

By comparing depth trends to measurements from nearby monitoring wells, Perrone and Jasechko could also deduce how close functional wells were to drying out. They found that in many areas groundwater levels are declining, yet new wells are not being drilled deeper to keep pace with the falling water table. Since wells aren't getting substantially deeper in many areas, newer wells are at least as vulnerable as older wells should groundwater levels continue to decline.

"In some places, groundwater levels are close to the bottom of wells," Perrone stated. "If groundwater levels continue to decline in these places, wells will go dry, leaving people without access to water."

The two researchers also availed themselves of data from NASA's GRACE mission. The pair of GRACE satellites detect small differences in the Earth's gravitational field as they orbit the planet. This provided Perrone and Jasechko with information about groundwater reserves for regions where data from monitoring wells is limited.

"We only have groundwater level monitoring data for a few dozen countries," Jasechko said, "but GRACE data allows us to explore changes in water storage around the globe." While the resolution was coarse, the additional information confirmed the disconnect between declining groundwater and the construction of deeper wells.

There are many reasons not to drill deeper. It's much more expensive in terms of drilling and operational costs. The quality of groundwater can also decrease at depth, often becoming more saline toward the bottom of an aquifer.

"Drilling wells is expensive," Jasechko remarked. "Even if fresh water exists deep underground, not every individual or household has the capital to drill a new well to access it, which raises concerns about equity when wells run dry."

The pair hope to expand the coverage of their dataset, especially to countries like China, Iran and Pakistan, three major users of groundwater that the researchers could not obtain records from. They also plan to investigate the extent of groundwater decline in future research, looking for information on how quickly water tables are dropping and where the trend is accelerating.

Groundwater can provide a lifeline in even the most arid regions.

Perrone and Jasechko have made a name for themselves in the field of groundwater research by approaching the topic with enormous datasets like this one. The global study comes on the heels of another paper published in Nature on groundwater resources across the United States. There, they revealed the extent to which rivers across the country are losing flow to aquifers, in part due to pumping.

Together, the findings paint a broad picture not just of wells in danger, but of dwindling groundwater resources as a whole. While pumping may have the most direct impact on aquifers, the authors note, human activity has many indirect effects on groundwater quality and levels. Industrial activity, water diversion and even pavement and runoff affect the water beneath our feet. Climate change may exert the greatest influence over the long term, as it alters the distribution and intensity of precipitation and evapotranspiration from plants and soils worldwide.

"These findings highlight the importance of groundwater resources and groundwater management to the global community," Perrone said. "Putting all the data together reveals that declining groundwater levels threaten wells in many places across the world."

Groundwater sustainability is a complex issue with a lot of considerations and tradeoffs, the authors acknowledged. Deciding on a course of action won't be easy, but compiling and analyzing large datasets like this are a critical first-step in tackling the challenge. "With these data, we can make more informed management decisions to help us use groundwater sustainably," Perrone said.

Response options should be at the center of climate risk assessment and management

UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

Research News

 

IMAGE: INTERACTIONS OF A SINGLE DRIVER FOR EACH DETERMINANT OF A RISK, NAMELY HAZARD, VULNERABILITY, EXPOSURE, AND RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE. view more 

CREDIT: SIMPSON ET AL. 2021 (PLEASE HYPERLINK TO PAPER)

A team of researchers from the Africa Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI) led a global team of 21 climate risk scholars to better understand and inform decision making around climate change risks in Africa and globally by examining how the drivers of risk interact.

Their work extends on existing risk frameworks with the hope that this research could help decision makers, managers and researchers understand the inherent complexity of climate change.

"Understanding the interactions among risks holds potential to change the way we respond to the risks. This is important because policy makers may worry about the risk of implementing a response as much, or more so, than the risk the response aims to reduce. This can lead to inaction at the very time when we need to be most active and investing heavily in our response to climate change," said Dr Nick Simpson, lead author of the paper published in One Earth, and postdoctoral fellow at the ACDI based at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

Two important responses to climate change - adaptation and mitigation - are often not considered as part of climate risk assessment. In the article, the team, extends the existing risk framework used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by including response options, identifying multiple interactions of drivers of risk, and risk interactions in risk assessment.

Across the suite of terms that have been applied to climate change risk for human and natural systems, there is a commonality: an interaction or aggregation of the determinants of risk (hazard, exposure, vulnerability), and of multiple risks. The researchers expand on this by explicitly recognising that a response to climate change can also be a driver of risk as shown in the diagram below.

For example, biological responses to heatwaves can create faster than normal soil moisture depletion known as a 'false spring' as a response to unusual early season growth increasing risk of wildfire and compound conditions of extreme heat (hazard), duration of heatwave (exposure) and increased fuel load (vulnerability).

Yet, response has been generally considered separately or secondarily to interactions between hazards, exposures and vulnerabilities. As a result, response is considered for how it can manage or reduce risk rather than how it might also create risk. But response should be at the centre of climate risk assessment and management.

Simpson highlighted the importance of this innovation: "If human and biological response to climate change was better integrated with conceptualisation of risk, its assessment would be more policy relevant and better reflect real-world decision making around risk," he said.

The framework goes on to identify two more categories of complex climate change risk and highlights the importance of also considering the interactions of the multiple drivers of risk and interactions between risks themselves. This is particularly important in the African context where there is unique vulnerability and exposure challenges for particular populations and is well illustrated by the interactions of risks during the Cape Town drought.

Effective responses to the drought were delayed due to the political risk of declaring a disaster and a lack of feasible water supply alternatives. Responses became increasingly urgent in early 2018 as the potential of a 'Day Zero' event became possible, the point at which a city of four million people might run out of water. The risk of 'Day Zero' was anticipated to cascade to affect risks to health, economic output and security and responses by different groups interacted to generate risks to municipal finance.

Considering interactions among these multiple risk and risk drivers is important as it shifts risk assessment from a concentration on individual climate hazards or interactions of hazards as a single 'event', such as a drought or flood, to situate that climate hazard within a set of multiple events interacting continuously with evolving social and economic conditions.

Access the full study: Simpson, N.P., et al. (2021). Assessing and responding to complex climate change risks, One Earth. DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.03.005.

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How philosophy can change the understanding of pain

A German-Canadian research team is calling for a more comprehensive approach

RUHR-UNIVERSITY BOCHUM

Research News

 P

Dr. Sabrina Coninx from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Dr. Peter Stilwell from McGill University, Canada, have investigated how philosophical approaches can be used to think in new ways about pain and its management. The researchers advocate not merely reducing chronic pain management to searching and treating underlying physical changes but instead adopting an approach that focuses on the person as a whole. Their work was published online in the journal "Synthese" on 15 April 2021.

It is not currently possible to treat chronic pain effectively in many cases. This has encouraged researchers from various disciplines to consider new approaches to pain and its management over recent years. "Pain research and clinical practice do not take place in a vacuum, but instead involve implicit assumptions regarding what pain is and how it can be treated," says Sabrina Coninx, research assistant at the Bochum research training group Situated Cognition. "Our aim is to shed light on these assumptions and discover how we can think in new ways about pain and its management with the help of philosophical approaches." In their work, the authors develop a holistic, integrative and action-oriented approach.

Viewing patients as a whole

In specific terms, they suggest three things: firstly, addressing pain should involve more than just looking for and treating underlying physiological changes. A holistic approach places the focus on patients as a whole and creates space for their experiences, concerns, expectations and narratives. The influence of socio-cultural practices in the generation of chronic pain should also be taken into account. For example, pain patients are often initially encouraged to protect themselves from injury and avoid activity, which may be helpful in the beginning but can contribute to chronification in the long run.

Secondly, according to the researchers, chronic pain should be understood as a dynamic process in which many different factors interact in a non-linear way. The initial cause of pain, for instance, is not necessarily the cause of its chronification and also does not need to be the most crucial factor in treatment. The complex interaction of subjective experience, expectations, learned behavioural patterns, neural reorganisation, stigmatisation and other factors therefore needs to be considered.

Focus on action possibilities

Thirdly, according to Coninx and Stilwell, patients should be encouraged to interact with their environment and identify possibilities for action. This is based on the assumption that chronic pain fundamentally changes the way in which patients perceive themselves and their relationship with their environment. Pain treatment could therefore involve helping the patient to increasingly notice positively associated and personally meaningful options for action and view themselves as capable of taking action again. There is then less focus on the body as an obstacle, and instead the patients pay more attention to how they can overcome limitations.

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Research shows pain relieving effects of CBD

A new study led by researchers at Syracuse University sheds light on the ability of CBD to reduce pain along with the impact that the so-called placebo effect may have on pain outcomes

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: MARTIN DE VITA IS A RESEARCHER IN THE PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT AT SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY'S COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES AND COAUTHOR OF THE STUDY. view more 

CREDIT: SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY

It's been hailed as a wonder drug and it's certainly creating wonder profits. By some estimates, the Cannabidiol (or CBD) market could be worth $20 billion dollars by 2024. While users tout its effectiveness in pain relief, up until now there's been limited experimental human research on the actual effectiveness of the drug. However, a new study led by researchers at Syracuse University sheds light on the ability of CBD to reduce pain along with the impact that the so-called placebo effect may have on pain outcomes.

"For science and the public at large the question remained, is the pain relief that CBD users claim to experience due to pharmacological effects or placebo effects," asked Martin De Vita, a researcher in the psychology department at Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences. "That's a fair question because we know that simply telling someone that a substance has the ability to relieve their pain can actually cause robust changes in their pain sensitivity. These are called expectancy effects." De Vita, along with Syracuse Emeritus Psychology Professor Stephen Maisto, were uniquely prepared to answer that exact question. The pair, along with fellow lab member and doctoral candidate Dezarie Moskal, previously conducted the first systematic review and meta-analysis of experimental research examining the effects cannabinoid drugs on pain. As the first experimental pain trial to examine CBD, their study yielded consistent and noteworthy results. Among other findings, the data showed that CBD and expectancies for receiving CBD do not appear to reduce experimental pain intensity, but do make the pain feel less unpleasant.

De Vita and Maisto used sophisticated equipment that safely induces experimental heat pain, allowing them to measure how the recipient's nervous system reacts and responds to it. "Then we administer a drug, like pure CBD, or a placebo and then re-assess their pain responses and see how they change based on which substance was administered," said De Vita. Researchers then took it a step farther by manipulating the information given to participants about which substances they received. In some cases, participants were told that they got CBD when they actually received a placebo, or told they would be getting a placebo when they actually got CBD. "That way we could parse out whether it was the drug that relieved the pain, or whether it was the expectation that they had received the drug that reduced their pain," according to De Vita. "We hypothesized that we would primarily detect expectancy-induced placebo analgesia (pain relief). What we found though after measuring several different pain outcomes is that it's actually a little bit of both. That is, we found improvements in pain measures caused by the pharmacological effects of CBD and the psychological effects of just expecting that they had gotten CBD. It was pretty remarkable and surprising."

"The data is exciting but pretty complex in that different pain measures responded differently to the drug effect, to the expectancy, or both the drug and expectancy combined--so we're still trying to figure out what is behind the differential data with different kinds of pain measures," said Maisto. "The next step is studying the mechanisms underlying these findings and figuring out why giving instructions or CBD itself causes certain reactions to a pain stimulus."

Most people think of pain as an on and off switch, you either have it or you don't. But pain, as De Vita describes it, is a complex phenomenon with several dimensions influenced by psychological and biological factors. For example, whereas pain intensity reflects a "sensory" dimension of pain, unpleasantness represents an "affective," or emotional, aspect of pain. "If you think of pain as the noxious noise coming from a radio the volume can represent the intensity of the pain, while the station can represent the quality," said De Vita. Results from his previous study showed that while cannabinoid drugs weren't reducing the volume of pain, they were "changing the channel making it a little less unpleasant." According to De Vita, "It's not sunshine and rainbows pleasant, but something slightly less bothersome. We replicated that in this study and found that CBD and expectancies didn't significantly reduce the volume of the pain, but they did make it less unpleasant--it didn't bother them as much." As part of the study De Vita and Maisto developed advanced experimental pain measurement protocols "to pop the hood and start looking at some of these other mechanistic pain processes," said De Vita. "It's not just pain, yes or no, but there are these other dimensions of pain, and it would be interesting to see which ones are being targeted. We found that sometimes pharmacological effects of CBD brought down some of those, but the expectancies did not. Sometimes they both did it. Sometimes it was just the expectancy. And so, we were going into this thinking we were going to primarily detect the expectancy-induced pain relief but what we found out was way more complex than that and that's exciting."

One important note to also consider is the source of the CBD. "What we used in our study was pure CBD isolate oil," said De Vita. "Commercially available CBD products differ in their content and purity, so results might be different for different CBD products, depending on what other compounds they may or may not contain."

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Martin De Vita is currently completing a clinical psychology internship at Brooke Army Medical Center, JBSA, TX. The view(s) expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official policy or position of Brooke Army Medical Center, the U.S. Army Medical Department, the U.S. Army Office of the Surgeon General, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Air Force and Department of Defense or the U.S. Government

STONER ONE

CAPTION

Syracuse University Emeritus Psychology Professor Stephen Maisto is a coauthor of the CBD pain relief study.

CREDIT

Syracuse University

STONER TWO

CAPTION

Dezarie Moskal is a doctoral candidate at Syracuse University and assisted in the CBD pain relief study.

CREDIT

Syracuse University

UNH research: Climate change affects deep-sea corals and sponges differently

UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE

Research News

 

DURHAM, N.H.-- Corals and sponges are important foundations in ocean ecosystems providing structure and habitats that shelter a high number of species like fish, crabs and other creatures, particularly in the seamounts and canyons of the deep sea. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have discovered that when it comes to climate change not all deep-sea corals and sponges are affected the same and some could be threatened if average ocean temperatures continue to increase in the deep sea of the Northwest Atlantic.

"These deep-sea corals and sponges are ecologically important because they are foundational species that contribute to the food web and losing them could eventually lower the biodiversity of the deep sea," said Jennifer Dijkstra, a research assistant professor in UNH's Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping.

In their study, published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, the researchers combined data about temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity and depth with high-resolution underwater video of the seafloor. The video was collected by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) along the Northeast Canyons and New England Seamount Chain by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Ocean Exploration and Research branch. The researchers analyzed the data and annotated the ROV video to determine the density of the corals and sponges in specific areas, allowing the scientists to identify their location. They linked environmental variables to emerging patterns and high densities in narrow environmental ranges. Although corals and sponges co-occur, climate-related variables temperature, salinity and dissolved oxygen contributed to the distribution of sponges, whereas seafloor properties of slope and substrate contributed to the distribution of corals.

"The paper shows that not all deep-sea corals and sponges were influenced by the same environmental variables and each has different levels of sensitivity," said Dijkstra. "Changes in temperature and dissolved oxygen, that go beyond what the deep-sea corals and sponges are used to, could stress the species' physiology affecting growth, tissue loss and reproduction."

In general, deep-sea corals are found 200 to 10,000 feet below sea level where sunlight is nonexistent. Unlike shallow-water coral reefs, which are limited to warm tropical waters, deep-sea corals are found throughout the world's oceans, from tropical to polar regions, forming groves of tree or fan shapes that can reach feet to meters tall. Deep-sea sponge populations can filter water, collect bacteria and process carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Deep-sea corals and sponges have been found on continental shelves, canyons and seamounts in deep seas around the world but their full extent is unknown because only 15 percent of the Earth's seafloor has been mapped with high-resolution imaging.

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New species of dumbo octopus identified using minimally invasive techniques

BMC (BIOMED CENTRAL)

Research News

 

A new species of deep-sea dwelling dumbo octopus called Grimpoteuthis imperator sp. nov. has been described using a combination of MRI, micro-CT and minimally invasive gene analysis rather than traditional dissection methods. The findings are presented in the open access journal BMC Biology.

The single specimen, which was identified as a mature male, was named G. imperator because it was discovered in the northern part of the Emperor Seamounts, an undersea mountain ridge in the Northwest Pacific Ocean. In addition to the scientific name in Latin, the authors suggest possible common names for this new species such as Emperor dumbo, Dumbo impérial (French), and Kaiserdumbo (German).

Finned or dumbo octopods, although considered rare organisms, form a significant part of the megafauna in deep-sea habitats down to at least 7,000 m depth. Current methods used to describe new cephalopod species often require dissection to examine internal organs, which involves damage to or even partial destruction of a specimen and may thus preclude analysis of singular, endangered, rare, or otherwise valuable organisms.

Alexander Ziegler and Christina Sagorny at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany combined non-invasive methods including digital photography, standardized measurements, high-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and micro-computed tomography (micro-CT), with minimally-invasive tissue sampling for DNA analysis to gather morphological as well as molecular information on the specimen collected during R/V SONNE's scientific cruise SO-249 BERING. Using this novel combination of non-invasive and minimally invasive techniques allowed the authors to describe a large zoological specimen for the first time without damaging it.

The authors were able to identify details including shell and gill shape, digestive tract morphology, as well as more minute structures such as the nervous system and sensory organs, but also morphological characters so far not used in the description of octopus species, such as the shape of the systemic heart. By using micro-CT, which is more suitable than MRI for visualization of chitinous tissues, the authors were also able to build the first interactive 3D model of a cephalopod beak.

Characteristics including shell form, fin position, and arm length identified the specimen as belonging to the genus Grimpoteuthis. However, the number of suckers, half-orange-shaped gills, and details of the shell differentiate it from all previously described Grimpoteuthis species.

Alexander Ziegler said: "The MRI and micro-CT datasets we have obtained here and which are publicly available from the repository MorphoBank could be used for further analyses that would not have been possible to this extent using conventional, invasive techniques. This may allow other researchers to draw conclusions about the life style and behaviour of hard-to-observe deep sea organisms."

Notes to editor:

1. Research article:

Holistic description of new deep sea megafauna (Cephalopoda: Cirrata) using a minimally invasive approach

Ziegler and Sagorny. BMC Biology 2021

DOI: 10.1186/s12915-021-01000-9

For an embargoed copy of the research article please contact Anne Korn at BMC or visit the Springer Nature press site.

After the embargo lifts, the article will be available here:

https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-021-01000-9

Please name the journal in any story you write. If you are writing for the web, please link to the article. All articles are available free of charge, according to BMC's open access policy.

2. BMC Biology is an open access journal publishing outstanding research in all areas of biology, with a publication policy that combines selection for broad interest and importance with a commitment to serving authors well.

3. A pioneer of open access publishing, BMC has an evolving portfolio of high quality peer-reviewed journals including broad interest titles such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, specialist journals such as Malaria Journal and Microbiome, and the BMC series. At BMC, research is always in progress. We are committed to continual innovation to better support the needs of our communities, ensuring the integrity of the research we publish, and championing the benefits of open research. BMC is part of Springer Nature, giving us greater opportunities to help authors connect and advance discoveries across the world.

First description of a new octopus species without using a scalpel

Biologists at the University of Bonn use state-of-the-art non-destructive methods to study an octopus from the deep sea

UNIVERSITY OF BONN

Research News

 

IMAGE: EXTENDS JUST OVER HALFWAY DOWN THE ARMS. THIS SUGGESTS A HABITAT CLOSE TO THE SEAFLOOR. view more 

CREDIT: © ALEXANDER ZIEGLER

An evolutionary biologist from the University of Bonn brought a new octopus species to light from depths of more than 4,000 meters in the North Pacific Ocean. The sensational discovery made waves in the media a few years ago. Researchers in Bonn have now published the species description and named the animal "Emperor dumbo" (Grimpoteuthis imperator). Just as unusual as the organism is the researchers' approach: in order to describe the new species, they did not dissect the rare creature, but instead used non-destructive imaging techniques. The results have now been published in the prestigious journal BMC Biology.

In the summer of 2016, Dr. Alexander Ziegler from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Ecology at the University of Bonn spent several months in the North Pacific aboard the research vessel SONNE. The crew lowered the steel basket to the seabed around 150 times in order to retrieve rocks, sediments, and living creatures. One organism in particular caused a media stir: a dumbo octopus. The animal, about 30 centimeters in size, was found in waters more than 4,000 meters deep. However, the octopus could not be recovered alive: "The deep-sea organism is not adapted to the environmental conditions of the ocean surface," Ziegler explains.

Dumbo octopuses are a group of deep-sea-dwelling octopuses that includes 45 species. The name is based on the flying elephant from the Walt Disney movie of the same name, who is made fun of because of his unusually large ears - the fins of the dumbo octopuses, which are on the sides of the head resemble these elephant ears. However, the dumbo on the research vessel SONNE differed significantly from the known octopus species. "It was clear to me straight away that we had caught something very special," the biologist reports. So Ziegler immediately photographed the unusual animal, took a small tissue sample for DNA analysis, and then preserved the octopus in formalin.

Together with his former master's student Christina Sagorny, Ziegler has now published a description of the previously unknown species. Just as unusual as the octopus was the methodology used. The animals are usually dissected by zoologists, as the internal organs are also important for the description of a new species. "However, as this octopus is very valuable, we were looking for a non-destructive method," explains the researcher.

High-field MRI instead of scalpel

The eight-armed cephalopod therefore did not end up under the scalpel, but in the high-field magnetic resonance imaging system of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Bonn. This device is routinely used to image test persons' brains. Thankfully, Dr. Eberhard D. Pracht from the DZNE agreed to conduct a high-resolution scan of the dumbo octopus in 3D. As part of her master's thesis, Christina Sagorny then investigated whether high-field MRI can be used to study internal organs and other soft tissues just as well as through conventional dissection. "The quality is actually even better," Ziegler says.

One of the few exceptions: the beak and rasping tongue (radula) of the cephalopod are made of hard chitin that does not image well using MRI. The biologists therefore also consulted the micro-computed tomography system of the paleontologists at the University of Bonn. This technique showed the beak and radula razor-sharp and in 3D. "These hard part structures are an integral part of the species description of octopuses," Ziegler explains. The researchers also decoded the animal's genetic material to reconstruct the family relationships. Ziegler: "The DNA showed beyond a doubt that we were looking at a species of the genus Grimpoteuthis."

Examination of the reproductive organs revealed the dumbo octopus to be an adult male. Compared to other species of this genus, it displays several special characteristics. For example, an average of 71 suckers were detected on each arm, which the animal needs to catch prey and which reflect body size. The length of the cirri, which are small appendages on the arms that the deep-sea animals presumably use to sense their prey, also differs from species already known.

The web that stretches between the arms, with which the dumbo slowly floats down in the water column, catching worms and crustaceans as if in a bell, also only reaches just over halfway from the mouth down the arms. "The web is much longer in dumbo octopus species that mainly float freely in the water column," Ziegler says. This would indicate that the new species lives close to the seafloor, because otherwise the web would be a hindrance to movements on the bottom.

As the species-describing researchers, Sagorny and Ziegler had the privilege of naming the new species: they decided on Grimpoteuthis imperator - in English "Emperor dumbo". Background: the animal was discovered not far from Japan in an underwater mountain range whose peaks are named after Japanese emperors.

Digital copy of the organism

The combination of non-destructive methods produced a crisp digital copy of the animal. Anybody interested can download it from the online database "MorphoBank" for further research and learning purposes. The preserved octopus itself is kept in the archives of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany. "There, it can then still be analyzed 100 years from now, for example when more modern investigation methods or new questions arise," Ziegler explains. "Our non-destructive approach could set a precedent, especially for rare and valuable animals," said the Bonn-based evolutionary biologist.

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Funding:

No third-party funds were used to conduct the study.

Publication: Alexander Ziegler, Christina Sagorny: Holistic description of new deep sea megafauna (Cephalopoda: Cirrata) using a minimally invasive approach, BMC Biology, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-021-01000-9

Video of the recovery of the emperor dumbo: https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-021-01000-9

CAPTION

the Emperor dumbo (Grimpoteuthis imperator). The description of the new species also includes the internal organs, which are shown here in color in the form of an interactive 3D model.

CREDIT

© Alexander Ziegler

Quantifying the level of pollution in marinas

UNIVERSITY OF SEVILLE

Research News

IMAGE: ALEJANDRO FERNÁNDEZ-ROMERO, ONE OF THE AUTHORS OF THE STUDY view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSIDAD DE SEVILLA

An interdisciplinary group of Spanish scientists, bringing together biologists and chemists from the Universities of Seville, Huelva, the Autonomous University of Madrid and the Institute of Marine Sciences of Andalusia of the CSIC in Cadiz, have just published the results of their pioneering research studying the management of marinas. The group of scientists, led by the US professor José Manuel Guerra García, studied in detail the sediments in Andalusia's marinas and has proposed a new index, the MEPI (Marinas Environmental Pollution Index) to quantify the level of contamination in these ports.

There has been a proliferation of marinas in recent years, in Spain, other Mediterranean countries and in the rest of the world. Marinas are highly modified ecosystems that have a great impact on marine biota. On the one hand, they alter the area's hydrodynamism, damming ecosystem in and tending to concentrate pollutants (heavy metals, hydrocarbons, etc.). In addition, recreational boats can be responsible for transporting invasive species from one area to another, attached to the boats' hulls.

"It is essential to regulate these marinas. To this end, authorities need scientists to provide tools to manage these ecosystems in the best possible way. Ideally, we should try to build more environmentally sustainable ports and aim to establish minimum ecological quality levels enabling us to identify marinas that make efforts to control environmental conditions and make their waters and sediments higher quality than elsewhere", explains Professor Guerra.

Specifically, the MEPI index is based on parameters such as hydrocarbons, heavy metals, faecal coliforms, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and biocides such as Irgarol, which are used as a base in the manufacture of the antifouling paints applied to prevent organisms from adhering to recreational boats. The MEPI index was developed using national and international sediment quality recommendations and reference values and ranges proposed by legislation in different countries around the world. Together with the new index, the authors have applied a simple and complete ecological analysis method to determine a port's quality in a holistic and integrated way, taking into account both chemical and biological parameters. For this purpose their models used not only the MEPI, but also values relating to the diversity of organisms living in the sediments, biotic indices measuring the quality of the seabed based on these organisms, and biotic pollution indices based on the number and abundance of invasive species. Thus, communities of organisms living on the bottom of the ports were studied, including both macrofauna (those larger than 0.5 mm such crustaceans, molluscs, annelid worms and echinoderms mainly), and meiofauna (smaller than 0.5 mm, mainly copepods and nematodes).

"These small animals that live in ports are the best 'whistleblowers' of port quality, making the role of biologists crucial in understanding how these ecosystems function. Depending on the species we find, we can tell how polluted a port has become," adds the researcher.

The study's innovative approach enabled the integration of both environmental parameters, where the role of chemists was key, and biological parameters as part of a holistic model. Based on all the indicators used, the researchers have proposed a total scoring system (the sum of each parameter's partial score) that allows the ecological quality status of a port to be established using a scale that is easy for authorities to interpret and in line with the European water quality directives. On this basis, colour-coded quality levels can then be established for each marina, ranging from red (very poor quality) to blue (excellent quality).

Thanks to this excellent work, in which the researcher Alejandro Fernández-Romero also participated, and based on the study of the marinas along the Andalusian coast, simple and integrated environmental quality assessment tools are now available for application in any marina anywhere in the world. The information provided can be key, for example, to awarding distinctions, such as the blue flag, to marinas that meet environmental quality requirements. Similarly, Dr. Guerra carried out several studies during his doctoral thesis which demonstrated that the creation of tunnels or hydrodynamic channels in ports, or ports designed with double entrances, such as the port of Ceuta, allow greater water renewal, increase oxygen levels and favour higher levels of biological diversity.

"We must try to move towards 'eco-sustainable' designs that minimise the negative impact of creating or remodelling a port. In this sense, both biologists and chemists can contribute invaluable input for engineers, ensuring they opt for coastal infrastructure designs that are more ecological and less harmful to marine flora and fauna", concludes José Manuel Guerra.

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