GOOD NEWS ARACHNOPHILES
Assassin spider that was feared extinct after bushfires discovered on Kangaroo Island

Researchers say the sighting brings hope the arachnid, also known as the pelican spider, has survived

An aerial photo taken on 16 January, 2020, shows Kangaroo Island after the bushfires. The assassin spider was feared extinct following the fires.

 Photograph: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images


Donna Lu
Wed 17 Nov 2021 

A recent sighting of the Kangaroo Island assassin spider, feared extinct after the disastrous 2019–20 bushfires, has given researchers new hope for the survival of the species.

Assassin spiders belong to an ancient family that dates back tens of millions of years. So named because they prey on other spiders, the invertebrates are also known as pelican spiders for their unusually elongated necks and jaws, which they use to impale their prey.

The Kangaroo Island assassin spider, about 5mm long, was only known to live in the Western River wilderness protection area, which was completely destroyed by the 2019–20 bushfires.

“That was burnt at high severity to such an extent that there was no vegetation, no organic matter at the site,” said Dr Jessica Marsh, who has been studying invertebrates on the South Australian island for 13 years.


‘Overlooked’: 14,000 invertebrate species lost habitat in Black Summer bushfires, study finds

After months of surveys of unburnt areas nearby, a research team discovered two assassin spiders in September, on a patch of leaf litter 4km from their previously known habitat.

The team is keeping the precise location of the sighting confidential for the time being.

Marsh, an honorary research associate at the South Australian Museum, said: “That we found one after all this time – it was really a moment that will stick with me. It was very powerful.”

Marsh said the Kangaroo Island assassin spider was vulnerable to even low-severity fires. The species lives in leaf litter suspended in low-lying vegetation, which burns readily when bushfires hit.

She said only an estimated one third of all invertebrate species in Australia have been discovered, posing a major conservation challenge. “For two thirds of species, we have no way of assessing their conservation risk or knowing if they’ve gone extinct.”

Marsh said while people were aware of the importance of pollinators such as bees, there was “general political and public apathy towards invertebrates”.

“They’re vitally important to ecosystem function but they also largely ignored,” she said, citing the role of detritivores in breaking down leaf litter and recycling nutrients into the soil, and predators and parasitoids that help to regulate ecosystems.

The Kangaroo Island assassin spider was feared extinct following the 2019-2020 bushfires. 

Photograph: Dr Jessica Marsh / South Australian Museum

“It’s really likely that the Kangaroo Island assassin spider isn’t the only one that’s been severely impacted [by the fires].”

A report published last month found that more than 14,000 species of invertebrate lost habitat as a result of the 2019-20 bushfires, and recommended a doubling of the number of species listed as threatened.

“I think with invertebrates, a lot of people don’t have any emotive connection to them. They either mostly ignore them or actively dislike them,” Marsh said. “When you get to work closely with a species and you get to know and respect them, you do build up an emotional connection.”

The Kangaroo Island team will continue surveying for more sightings that might increase the assassin spider’s known range.

Feral pig activity in the north west of the island threatens their survival, in addition to fire.

It was important to prevent the pigs from digging up vegetation and in around creek lines, which would help to protect the spider, Marsh said.

Supersaurus might be the longest dinosaur that ever lived

By Laura Geggel 1 day ago

This dino-mite champ was at least 128 feet long.

An illustration of Supersaurus shows what a giant it was, reaching at least 128 feet (39 meters) in length. (Image credit: Sean Fox/Fossil Crates)

The gold medal for the longest dinosaur in the world might go to the aptly named Supersaurus, now that scientists have fixed a fossil mix-up and analyzed new bones excavated from the long-necked dinosaur's final resting spot.

Like other exceedingly long dinosaurs, Supersaurus is a diplodocid — a long-necked sauropod whose whip-like tail went on for days. Supersaurus has always been viewed as one of longest dinosaurs, but research now shows that "this is the longest dinosaur based on a decent skeleton," as other dinosaur remains are fragmentary, and it's challenging to accurately estimate their lengths, Brian Curtice, a paleontologist at the Arizona Museum of Natural History who is spearheading the research, told Live Science

When Supersaurus was alive about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic period, it exceeded 128 feet (39 meters) and possibly even reached 137 feet (42 m) from snout to tail, Curtice's new research found. Even its "shorter" size is record-breaking; at 128 feet, the dinosaur would have been longer than another contender — Diplodocus, which could reach lengths of 108 feet (33 m), according to a 2006 study of a specimen known as Seismosaurus in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin.

The research, which is not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, was presented online Nov. 5 at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual conference.

Related: Titanosaur photos: Meet the largest dinosaur on record

The new finding is nearly 50 years in the making; the first Supersaurus specimen was uncovered in 1972 in a chock-full bonebed, in what was basically a "bone salad," Curtice said. So, it wasn't immediately clear which bones belonged to the beast.

That bone salad was excavated by dinosaur field worker Jim Jensen, who collected and prepared fossils for Brigham Young University in Utah, in Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry in Colorado. Jensen discovered an 8-foot-long (2.4 m) scapulocoracoid — two fused bones that make up the shoulder girdle in adult dinosaurs and other reptiles. The quarry also contained additional bones that Jensen thought belonged to two other sauropod dinosaurs, which years later he named Ultrasauros and Dystylosaurus.

News of the beastly bones made headlines. The public was intrigued that a dinosaur larger than Brachiosaurus, then considered the longest dinosaur, existed, according to the blog Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week (SV-POW), run by paleontologists Michael Taylor and Mathew Wedel. A journalist incidentally named the biggest beast Supersaurus in the frenzy following its discovery.

In 1985, Jensen published a study in the journal Great Basin Naturalist announcing the discovery of three new sauropod dinosaurs from the quarry. However, Jensen wasn't a trained paleontologist, and he made some mistakes with his analysis. Over the years, paleontologists have debated whether Ultrasauros and Dystylosaurus are valid genera, or whether — as Curtice believes — their bones were misidentified and actually all belong to a single Supersaurus.


Vertebrate paleontologist Brian Curtice digs for dinosaur bones.

 (Image credit: Courtesy Fossil Crates)

The case for Supersaurus

This reclassification of three dinosaurs as one provides a more complete Supersaurus specimen for scientists to study, which is useful for estimating its length.

So how can three dinosaurs become one? By uncovering the mistakes of years' past. For instance, one of the scapulocoracoids at the quarry is about 10 inches (25 centimeters) longer than the other, which led many scientists to believe that it belonged to another genus of dinosaur. But when Curtice inspected it, he found that the longer bone was actually distorted because of cracks. "If you push all the cracks together, [the scapulocoracoids are] basically the same size," he said.


The meat-eating dinosaur Allosaurus, which also lived during the late Jurassic period, was a pipsqueak compared with Supersaurus.

 (Image credit: Supersaurus by Sean Fox; Allosaurus by Gustavo Monroy/Fossil Crates)

He also found deformities, made by environmental forces, in bones attributed to Dystylosaurus and other genera, and he showed that these bones, in fact, belonged to Supersaurus.

In addition, no other excessively large sauropod bones were found nearby. Rather, all of the large, diplodocid-looking bones were found in one pocket of the quarry, and there weren't any duplicated bones (meaning there's just one left scapulocoracoid and one right scapulocoracoid, for example), Curtice said. And all of the massive dinosaur bones are roughly the same size, so they likely all belong to one individual: the Supersaurus, Curtice said.


Since the original finding, other paleontologists have discovered partial skeletons thought to be Supersaurus — including one nicknamed "Jimbo" and another dubbed "Goliath" — in Wyoming. However, researchers have yet to formally identify Goliath as a Supersaurus in a peer-reviewed journal.


Related: What's the world's largest dinosaur?



One Supersaurus individual was found in Colorado and two were unearthed in Wyoming. (Image credit: Fossil Crates)

How long are you?

Previous Supersaurus length estimates put it at the upper echelon of long dinosaurs, including a 2008 estimate of 108 to 111 feet (33 to 34 m), but those were based on incomplete data, Curtice said.

When the Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry was excavated, researchers removed large blocks of rocks and fossils and wrapped them up in plaster jackets. But preparing the fossils from these jackets is time intensive and tedious, so, even today, there are still several unopened kitchen table-size jackets from the quarry, Curtice said. Over the years, Curtice has dived into some of these unstudied bones and identified five new neck vertebrae, one new back vertebra, two new tail vertebrae and a left pubis. Previously, Curtice had mistakenly attributed some of these tail vertebrae to the diplodocid dinosaur Apatosaurus, until other research clued him into the fact that Supersaurus' tail looked like a mix of the Apatosaurus and Barosaurus dinosaurs' tails. These newly identified bones helped Curtice get a more accurate estimate of the new lengths for Supersaurus, including that its neck was longer than 50 feet (15 m) and its tail was upward of 60 feet (18 m) long.

What's more, the size and shape of the newly identified bones support the idea that all of the colossal bones found at Dry Mesa belong to Supersaurus, rather than three different large dinosaurs, Curtice said.


The discovered bones of the Supersaurus from Dry Mesa Dinosaur Quarry in Colorado. (Image credit: Daniel Barrera Guevara/Fossil Crates)


Based on the placement of one nearly 4.5-foot-long (1.3 m) neck vertebra, Supersaurus is either 128 feet or 137 feet long. "That is a crazy length — longer than three yellow school buses nose to tail," Curtice said in an SVP video. "And considering we never find the largest individual in the fossil record, how much longer could these animals have gotten?"


The conclusions drawn from the new research "seem reasonable" Matt Lamanna, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, who was not involved with the research, told Live Science. "I can't really weigh in on the exact length estimate, but it's clear that there is a very, very large diplodocid sauropod in that quarry."


The research would be strengthened if the dinosaur nicknamed Goliath were to be formally identified as a Supersaurus, especially because Curtice is using it to inform his analysis, Lamanna said. "I think the final verdict will come when this Goliath specimen is published, when this additional material from Dry Mesa is published. I want to see it go through formal peer review."

"I think it will be pretty exciting when he does," Lamanna added. "I think he's very probably correct."


Of note, Supersaurus may be the longest dinosaur on record, but it's not the heaviest. That honor likely goes to the superheavy titanosaur Argentinosaurus, which weighed upward of 90 tons (82 metric tons) and came close to weighing twice as much as Supersaurus did, Curtice said. Meanwhile, the longest animal on record isn't even a dinosaur. That title goes to a 150-foot-long (45 m) siphonophore — a translucent, stringy creature that, like coral, is made up of smaller beasties — that lives in a submarine canyon off the coast of Australia, Live Science previously reported.


Originally published on Live Science.

#CRYPTID #CRYPTOZOOLOGY

Fossils of Cretaceous-Period Coelacanth Discovered in Texas

Nov 16, 2021 by Sergio Prostak

The fossils are estimated to be around 96 million years old and belong to the first Cretaceous mawsoniid coelacanth from North America.

Reconstruction of Mawsonia sp. roaming in the brackish or fresh water costal environment of Texas during the Cenomanian age of the Late Cretaceous epoch. Image credit: Zubin Erik Dutta.

Coelacanths are a group of large lobe-finned fish (sarcopterygians) closely related to tetrapods.

They were thought to have been extinct for 66 million years, until a first living specimen was caught fortuitously in South Africa in 1938.

Coelacanths first appeared in the Early Devonian epoch, diversified a little in the Devonian and Carboniferous period, and attained a maximum of diversity in the Early Triassic.

During the Cretaceous, they are known by two families only, the Latimeriidae, which survived to the present with the genus Latimeria, and the Mawsoniidae, which went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous.

“Today, the only living genus of coelacanth, Latimeria is represented by two species along the eastern coast of Africa and in Indonesia,” said Dr. Lionel Cavin from the Department of Geology and Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, Geneva, and his colleagues.

“This sarcopterygian fish is nicknamed a ‘living fossil,’ in particular because of its slow evolution.”

“The large geographical distribution of Latimeria may be a reason for the great resilience to extinction of this lineage, but the lack of fossil records for this genus prevents us from testing this hypothesis.”



Photograph and surface rendering of left angular of Mawsonia sp. from the Woodbine Formation in lateral (A), medial (B), ventral (C) and dorsal (D) views. Abbreviations: a.f – adductor fossa; ar.De – articular surface for dentary; con.Part – contact surface with prearticular; f.m.s.c – openings of the mandibular sensory canal; gr.VII.m.ext – groove for external mandibular ramus of VII; l.f – longitudinal fossa; sut.p.Co – sutural contact surface with principal coronoid. Image credit: Cavin et al., 

doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259292

The newly-described coelacanth specimens were recovered from two localities of the Woodbine Formation in northeast Texas.

They belong to a previously unknown species of mawsoniid coelacanth in the genus Mawsonia.

This fresh, brackish water fish had a total body length of 1.5 m (4.9 feet) and lived during the Late Cretaceous epoch, some 96 million years ago.

“The Texan discovery of Mawsonia sp. adds an important new component to the Woodbine vertebrate fauna,” the paleontologists said.

“It is an unexpected Gondwanian representative in this Appalachian assemblage with predominantly Laurasian (European and Asian) affinities.”

“It considerably increases the geographical distribution of this genus, and confirms its occurrence at the beginning of the Late Cretaceous epoch.”

The findings were published online in the journal PLoS ONE.

_____

L. Cavin et al. 2021. The first late cretaceous mawsoniid coelacanth (Sarcopterygii: Actinistia) from North America: Evidence of a lineage of extinct ‘living fossils’. PLoS ONE 16 (11): e0259292; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259292

 SERPENTOLOGY

Snakes Diversified Explosively After the Dinosaurs Were Wiped Out 66 Million Years Ago

By PLOS NOVEMBER 15, 2021

A blunt-headed tree snake (Imantodes inornatus) eating its way through a batch of treefrog eggs. Credit: John David Curlis, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology.

Sudden burst of evolution 66 million years ago expanded snake diets and put vertebrates on the menu.

The remarkable diversification of mammals and birds after the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is well known; but what happened to the snakes? According to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Michael Grundler at the University of California, Los Angeles and Daniel Rabosky at the University of Michigan, snakes experienced a similarly spectacular burst of evolution from unassuming insectivorous ancestors to diverse lineages that included the newly available birds, fish and small mammals in their diets.

The K-Pg mass extinction event 66 million years ago – during which 75% of species, including all non-avian dinosaurs, went extinct – marked the beginning of the Cenozoic era and opened a myriad of empty niches for the surviving species to exploit. Like mammals and birds, snakes diversified rapidly during the Cenozoic era, resulting in the nearly 4,000 species that we see today.

To better understand the pace and sequence of this phenomenon, the researchers collated published data on the diets of 882 living snake species and used sophisticated mathematical models to reconstruct how the diets of their ancestors changed and diversified since the K-Pg boundary. They found that the most recent common ancestor of living snakes was insectivorous, but after the K-Pg boundary, snake diets rapidly expanded to include birds, fish, and small mammals – vertebrate groups that were also flourishing in the wake of the dinosaurs’ extinction.

A sampling of snake diversity. Clockwise from upper left: rainbow boa (Epicrates cenchria), image credit Pascal Title, U-M Museum of Zoology; Amazon basin tree snake (Imantodes lentiferus), image credit Pascal Title, U-M Museum of Zoology; western worm snake (Carphophis vermis), image credit Alison Rabosky, U-M Museum of Zoology; two-striped forest pitviper (Bothrops bilineatus), image credit Dan Rabosky, U-M Museum of Zoology; parrot snake (Leptophis ahaetulla), image credit Ivan Prates, U-M Museum of Zoology; and green anaconda (Eunectes murinus), image credit Dan Rabosky, U-M Museum of Zoology. These species show considerable variability in their diets, ranging from generalist predators on vertebrates (rainbow boa, anaconda) to species that specialize on sleeping lizards (tree snake), earthworms (worm snake), and tree frogs (parrot snake).

The study sheds light on the explosive adaptive radiation that gave rise to modern snake diversity. Diet diversification in snakes slowed after the initial radiation, but some lineages experienced further bursts of adaptive evolution. For example, Colubroid snakes diversified when Old World ancestors colonized North and South America. These findings show that mass extinctions and new biogeographic opportunities can spur evolutionary change, the authors say.

“Much of the stunning ecological diversity in snakes seems to result from evolutionary explosions triggered by ecological opportunity,” Grundler adds. “We find a major burst of snake diet diversification after the dinosaur extinction, and we also find that, when snakes arrive in new places, they often undergo similar bursts of dietary diversification.”

For more on this research, read Snakes Diversified Explosively After Mass Extinction Where Dinosaurs Were Wiped Out.

Reference: “Rapid increase in snake dietary diversity and complexity following the end-DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001414

Funding: This research was supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE 1841052) from the National Science Foundation to M.C.G. and by a fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to D.L.R. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Male Snakes Cannibalizing Females Present Evolutionary Puzzle

The Scientist speaks with organismal biologist Xavier Glaudas about possible reasons for his recent finding that male Montpellier snakes cannibalize female conspecifics.

A male Montpellier snake (Malpolon monspessulanus) swallowing a smaller female Montpellier snake

MARIE-GEORGE SERIE

Nov 15, 2021

Finding cannibalism in the animal kingdom is not particularly shocking. Famously, female black widow spiders (Latrodectus spp.) sometimes consume males after mating, an example of so-called sexual cannibalism. Similarly, cannibalism in snakes has been documented, especially in king cobras and Lataste’s vipers. In these snakes it’s usually the male being consumed, either by a male competitor or by a female conspecific. In a research note published in Ethology on October 15, researchers report that some male snakes flip this script, dining on females of the same species—that is, potential mates.

XAVIER GLAUDAS

There have been only a few previous reports of cannibalism in this species, known as Montpellier snakes (Malpolon monspessulanus). The new finding grew out of a French community database of animal observations in which users documented three instances of male Montpellier snakes cannibalizing adult female conspecifics in the south of France outside of their mating season. Xavier Glaudas, an organismal biologist affiliated with the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa, and his colleague Nicolas Fuento at the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux PACA, describe the finding in their paper and put forward multiple possible explanations for it, including the nature of snakes as opportunistic feeders, a lack of prey, and elimination of intraspecific competition. The Scientist spoke with Glaudas about potential advantages of cannibalism in general, and about the unexpected occurrences documented in his research note.

The Scientist: What was your initial reaction to finding out about these cases in Montpellier snakes?

Xavier Glaudas: I was very surprised. I was just like ‘Are you serious? Really?’ and it was not just one case. . . . I’m just thinking well, okay, we need to get all this stuff together. We need to write something because this is rather counterintuitive, and we need to report this. Then [Fuento] sent me pictures and I was absolutely excited about this.. . . . Then we got it confirmed by experts of the species to confirm that yes, indeed, these are three different cases of males feeding on adult females.
TS: What is shocking or counterintuitive about these instances of cannibalism in the Montpellier snakes that you reported on?

XG: Most of us biologists think that an adult male feeding on an adult female is kind of counterintuitive. I think it probably comes from the fact that the old paradigm was that generally a male would try to mate with as many females as he can to just increase his fitness. The males typically do not take care of the offspring. He is not the one that’s being pregnant. So, for him it would pay off to actually try to mate with every single female he encountered. . . . But recently, in the last few decades, the paradigm has been shifting, if you will, just because we realize that males—they can also be choosy in some ways about the females they mate with.

At first you think it is counterintuitive. And then when we wrote the paper, we just realized [that] in fact there may be many reasons for a male to eat a female. And that could be adaptive—in other words, it could actually benefit the male’s fitness to do that. We do highlight a few of those reasons that we think could potentially explain [these observations].

A male Montpellier snake holds an adult female behind the head with his jaws, possibly to eat her.
PHILIPPE BAILLEUL

TS: Can you explain the three different hypotheses listed in the paper for why these snakes engaged in this behavior?

XG: One trend is that cannibalism generally occurs in species that actually have a broad diet. [Montpellier snakes] are opportunistic predators. They are generally aggressive feeders, and so that’s a possibility we entertain: the males saw something moving and went into predatory mode. That’s one idea.

The other could be the prey population. [Montpelier snakes] do eat snakes on occasion, but they are not specialized snake feeders. So, it’s a possibility that their more typical prey were rarer at this time and that the males took this opportunity to feed [on conspecifics]. Or in the same line of thought, maybe this individual was starving. They did not seem particularly skinny or emaciated, but maybe . . . these individuals were very hungry, which motivated them to eat the females.

The third [possibility] is that it’s a good way to remove a competitor. Members of your own species are your worst competitors because they occupy the same ecological niche. They use the same resources, they typically feed on the same prey items, so by actually eating one of your own kind, you’re removing the strongest competitor that you are faced with.

It’s a bit different than most other cannibalistic published studies.

— Xavier Glaudas

TS: Do you believe one hypothesis is stronger?

XG: We have no way to say, and it’s also possible that there’s something else. . . . We can only speculate. We make an observation, and we try to explain it using the existing theoretical framework.

TS: Do you think there is a possibility of this cannibalistic behavior being a more common occurrence than previously thought?

XG: The thing is, it’s actually widespread. Many organisms show it and it’s pretty much everywhere in the animal kingdom. . . . There was a recently published paper on African cobras, and they showed that within cobra species, they predate upon one another. But the cannibals always fed on males. They didn’t report a single case of a male feeding on a female, which is quite interesting. This is why our study makes a contribution to describing patterns of cannibalism in nature. It’s a bit different than most other cannibalistic published studies.

[From a follow-up email:] Although we only have 3 observations, the fact that all these cannibalistic events involved males feeding on females suggests that this behavior may be more common than we think in this species.

A male Montpellier snake swallows a female
MARIE-GEORGE SERIE

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited by TS for brevity and by XG for accuracy and flow.

 

Neurotoxins in the environment damaging human brain health

Nov. 16,2921

By Arnold R. Eiser

PHILADELPHIA

In the summer of 2021, a toxic, smoky haze stemming from Western wildfires wafted across large parts of the United States, while hurricanes wrought extensive flooding in the southern and eastern U.S. Air quality websites such as AirNow warned of hazardous conditions on the U.S. East Coast from Western forest fires 3,000 miles away, with recommendations to stay indoors.

Journalists reported the immediate impact of lives lost and homes and property destroyed, but more insidious dangers escaped notice. Few people realize that these climate change-fueled disasters – both fires and floods – could adversely affect human health in longer-term ways.

I’m a scientist-author who studies the links between environmental factors and the development of neurological disorders, which is the subject of my recent book. My research on this topic adds to a growing body of evidence that more frequent environmental disasters may be raising human exposure to neurotoxins.

Neurotoxic smoke

Many scientists have identified links between air pollution in various forms, including from forest fire smoke, and an increased risk and prevalence of adverse health effects, including brain disorders.

Wildfire smoke is a mixture of countless noxious chemical compounds. Fires burning across the warming planet – from California to Greece and Australia – are adding dangerous particulate matter to the atmosphere that includes neurotoxic heavy metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium and manganese nanoparticles. These toxins are an added environmental burden on top of the pollutants emitted by factories, power plants, trucks, automobiles and other sources.

The greatest potential for health problems comes from minuscule particles, smaller than 2.5 microns – or PM 2.5 (for context, the width of a human hair is typically 50 to 70 microns). This is, in part, because tiny particles are easily inhaled; from the lungs, they enter the bloodstream and circulate widely throughout the body. In the brain they may inflame the microglial cells, the brain’s defensive cells, causing harm to neurons instead of protecting them. Studies show that these extremely tiny particles may damage neurons or brain cells by promoting inflammation. Brain inflammation can lead to conditions like dementia and Parkinson’s disease, a movement disorder in adults.

In addition, prenatal and early-life exposure to air pollution has been linked to an increased risk of autism spectrum disorder in children. Research suggests that air pollution exposure during these critical periods, particularly in the third trimester of pregnancy and the first few months of life, may impair normal neural development.

Waterborne neurotoxins

As part of my book research, I investigated potential links between environmental neurotoxins and related health effects in Finland. Seeking unique environmental factors that might underlie the disproportionately high rates of fatal dementia that occurred in Finland in the past decade, I found that water pollution – exacerbated by flooding, use of fertilizer and higher water temperatures – may be affecting brain health.

As I reviewed the environmental concerns in Finland, the widespread presence of blue-green algae in waterways stood out to me. Though it’s commonly called algae, blue-green algae is actually a type of bacteria called cyanobacteria. These toxic microorganisms thrive and proliferate in warm waterways when excessive nutrients, particularly phosphorus from fertilizer runoff, pour into fresh and brackish water. It produces cyanotoxins.

One of these cyanotoxins, β-methylamino-L-alanine, or BMAA, is linked to neurodegenerative disorders including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. In particular I was struck by scientists’ finding high levels of BMAA in mollusks and fish found in the Baltic Sea, which could potentially play a role in Finland’s high incidence of dementia, as fish is heavily consumed there.

Blue-green algae is found in rivers, lakes and seas. Its presence is a widespread problem for humans, dogs and wildlife in the U.S. and Canada, as well as around the globe. In 2020, more than 300 elephants in Botswana died after drinking from water sources contaminated by the cyanobacteria that cause these algal blooms. Blue-green algae is so widely present in Finland that scientists there have developed a quick test to determine whether it is present or not.

Mold neurotoxins

In Finland, warm, humid air creates the perfect conditions for mold to grow, and water-damaged buildings are particularly susceptible. Some species emit mycotoxins, or mold toxins. Long-term exposure to mycotoxins, even at low levels, can present serious health hazards for both people and animals.

Mold spores are tiny, making them easy to inhale or ingest. Inside the body they can trigger an immune response, leading to chronic inflammation. Ultimately, exposure to these spores may cause cognitive impairment, including memory loss, irritability, numbness, tremors and other symptoms. Such a situation is likely to develop after a region has experienced the flooding of residences or workplaces in the weeks after they have been damaged.

Mold toxins, particularly ochratoxin A, can trigger inflammation that may harm neurons and brain function. It has been specifically implicated in Parkinson’s disease.

Reducing risk and a way forward

Education, greater awareness of environmental health concerns and public action are the best ways to minimize risks from environmental neurotoxins.

By learning to recognize blue-green algae, people may avoid swimming or boating near it and avoid letting their pets near it too. Consumers can advocate for greater environmental monitoring of food and water sources. Exercise that involves sweating can help eliminate neurotoxic substances. But before you exercise outdoors, it is prudent to check air quality on an app or website like AirNow, a partnership of federal, state, local and tribal agencies.

If environmental policies aren’t put into place to mitigate the health risks posed by environmental neurotoxins, research suggests that we may continue to experience increases in a variety of neurodegenerative disorders as the toxins rise. Many of these conditions are labeled idiopathic, or lacking a known cause. The neurotoxic connection is rarely considered, and environmental health hazards are often overlooked in American health care. This is in large part because environmental health is rarely taught in medical education, which can lead to a lack of awareness about potential diagnoses related to an environmental illness.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is currently reevaluating air quality standards for particulate matter. A new EPA inspector general report calls for a strategic plan to control harmful algal blooms. Ohio, a leading state for public policy initiatives aimed at neurotoxic algal blooms, now regulates cyanotoxins in drinking water and advises farmers against adding fertilizer when the ground is saturated or when rain is in the forecast.

Since climate change may be a driver for rising neurotoxins, cutting greenhouse gas emissions and ensuring better environmental stewardship are essential to human health. Achieving this will require strong international and domestic efforts and a wide range of interventions by governments around the world. But all of these efforts must begin with a deeper and more widespread understanding of the profound nature of this problem – which should be a universal, nonpartisan concern.

Arnold R Eiser, MD, MACP is Professor Emeritus of Medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine. 

The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.

© The Conversation

Human Neurons are Strikingly Different from Those of Other Mammals, Study Says

Nov 11, 2021 by News Staff / Source

Human neurons have a much smaller number of channels that control the flow of ions (such as potassium and sodium) than expected, compared to the neurons of other mammals, according to new research led by MIT neuroscientists; and this reduction in channel density may have helped the human brain evolve to operate more efficiently, allowing it to divert resources to other energy-intensive processes that are required to perform complex cognitive tasks.

Neurons in the mammalian brain can receive electrical signals from thousands of other cells, and that input determines whether or not they will fire an electrical impulse called an action potential.

In 2018, MIT researcher Mark Harnett and colleagues discovered that human and rat neurons differ in some of their electrical properties, primarily in parts of the neuron called dendrites — tree-like antennas that receive and process input from other cells.

One of the findings from that study was that human neurons had a lower density of ion channels than neurons in the rat brain.

The researchers were surprised by this observation, as ion channel density was generally assumed to be constant across species.

In their new study, the scientists decided to compare neurons from several different mammalian species to see if they could find any patterns that governed the expression of ion channels.

They studied two types of voltage-gated potassium channels and the HCN channel, which conducts both potassium and sodium, in layer 5 pyramidal neurons, a type of excitatory neurons found in the brain’s cortex.

They were able to obtain brain tissue from 10 mammalian species: Etruscan shrews (one of the smallest known mammals), gerbils, mice, rats, Guinea pigs, ferrets, rabbits, marmosets, and macaques, as well as human tissue removed from patients with epilepsy during brain surgery.

This variety allowed the team to cover a range of cortical thicknesses and neuron sizes across the mammalian kingdom.

The authors found that in nearly every mammalian species they looked at, the density of ion channels increased as the size of the neurons went up.

The one exception to this pattern was in human neurons, which had a much lower density of ion channels than expected.

“The increase in channel density across species was surprising, because the more channels there are, the more energy is required to pump ions in and out of the cell,” Dr. Harnett said.

“However, it started to make sense once we began thinking about the number of channels in the overall volume of the cortex.”

In the tiny brain of the Etruscan shrew, which is packed with very small neurons, there are more neurons in a given volume of tissue than in the same volume of tissue from the rabbit brain, which has much larger neurons.

But because the rabbit neurons have a higher density of ion channels, the density of channels in a given volume of tissue is the same in both species, or any of the nonhuman species the researchers analyzed.

“This building plan is consistent across nine different mammalian species,” Dr. Harnett said.

“What it looks like the cortex is trying to do is keep the numbers of ion channels per unit volume the same across all the species. This means that for a given volume of cortex, the energetic cost is the same, at least for ion channels.”

The human brain represents a striking deviation from this building plan, however.

Instead of increased density of ion channels, the authors found a dramatic decrease in the expected density of ion channels for a given volume of brain tissue.

They believe this lower density may have evolved as a way to expend less energy on pumping ions, which allows the brain to use that energy for something else, like creating more complicated synaptic connections between neurons or firing action potentials at a higher rate.

“We think that humans have evolved out of this building plan that was previously restricting the size of cortex, and they figured out a way to become more energetically efficient, so you spend less ATP per volume compared to other species,” Dr. Harnett said.

The study was published in the journal Nature.

_____

L. Beaulieu-Laroche et al. Allometric rules for mammalian cortical layer 5 neuron biophysics. Nature, published online November 10, 2021; doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-04072-3

PENSIONS A PROMISE MADE A PROMISE UNKEPT

UK universities and colleges face three days of strikes in December


Staff at 58 institutions voted to strike over pay and conditions and to stop cuts to pensions

The University and College Union has said another six institutions will take indefinite industrial action short of striking from 1 December.

 Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

Richard Adams Education editor
Tue 16 Nov 2021 

Campuses will be hit by strikes at the start of next month and there is a threat of more next year after the University and College Union announced that its members will stop work over pension cuts, pay and working conditions.

The union said three consecutive days of strikes would take place from 1 December at the 58 institutions that backed ballots for industrial action this month.

The 58 universities and colleges will be joined by a further six in undertaking other forms of industrial action, including strict working to contract and refusing additional duties, from the start of December and continuing indefinitely.

UK university staff back strikes over pay and conditions

Jo Grady, the UCU’s general secretary, said: “While we set out pragmatic solutions that could halt widespread disruption to UK campuses, university bosses refuse to revoke unnecessary, swingeing pension cuts or even to negotiate on issues like casualisation and the unbearably high workloads that blight higher education.

“A resolution to this dispute is simple. But if employers remain intent on slashing pensions and exploiting staff who have kept this sector afloat during a pandemic then campuses will face strike action before Christmas, which will escalate into spring with reballots and further industrial action.”

The announcement sets up what could be a bitter dispute between the union and university leaders, with Universities UK – representing employers in the pensions dispute – rejecting Grady’s claim that there is a simple resolution.

“We have repeatedly stated our willingness to consult employers on any viable, affordable and implementable alternative proposal from the UCU and we remain fully committed to continuing talks to develop a joint approach,” a UUK spokesperson said.

UCU said the initial three-day strike “will just be the start of sustained disruption…. If employers do not make improved offers, further industrial action is likely to continue into the spring.”

The action is the latest chapter in a long-running dispute between staff – including lecturers, researchers, librarians and administrators – and university employers. The strikes follow more than 18 months of severe disruption and turmoil caused by the Covid pandemic that led to campuses being closed to most students.

Central to the dispute is the operation of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) and its management. UCU contends that the USS’s trustees have burdened the scheme with pessimistic forecasts, and have called for the fund to be revalued.

Others are going on strike after backing a separate ballot on issues including insecure contracts, low pay and inequality.


UK universities’ tuition income rises by a third, outpacing staff pay

The Universities and Colleges Employers’ Association said: “UCU members need to understand that any industrial action aimed at harming students is an unrealistic attempt to try to force all 146 employers to reopen the concluded 2021-22 national pay round and improve on an outcome that is for most of these institutions already at the very limit of what is affordable.”

Although the strike will disrupt teaching at the affected institutions, the National Union of Students said its poll of 1,600 students this month found overwhelming support, with 73% of students backing the strike action and just 9% opposed.

UUK said: “Universities will put in place measures to minimise the impact on students, other staff and the wider university community and will ensure that students can continue to learn and receive support.”

Retired John Deere employee explains why UAW members are not backing down


by: Stephanie Johnson

Posted: Nov 15, 2021 / 

DES MOINES, Iowa — On Wednesday, United Auto Workers union members will vote on the third preliminary contract agreement between John Deere after members rejected two prior proposals. A retired John Deere employee understands why employees are still on the picket lines after a month on strike.

“These were essential employees during the pandemic and they would like to be paid like they were essential to John Deere,” said retired John Deere employee Steve Goodner. “It’s hard work. We don’t make toothpicks. We make big heavy machinery.”

Goodner worked for the company for 45 years. He says the company experienced strikes about benefits in the 1980s.

“Mainly economic reasons, benefits. I remember distinctly voting on [if] we want[ed] to have dental insurance [and] vision,” said Goodner.

Now, Deere workers are fighting for higher wages. So far, UAW members have voted against two prior agreements. On Wednesday, they will vote on a third agreement that the union says included modest modifications.

John Deere says the third agreement is its best and final offer. However, Goodner believes UAW members have the upper hand.

“Economically, things have fallen John Deere’s way over the last contracts,” said Goodner. “This time, everything is different. [John Deere] is short of help, and they’ve got lots of orders for machinery that they can’t fill, and everybody is looking for workers.”

Goodner thinks if John Deere provided higher pay, the company’s search for employees would end.

“A substantial wage increase for these people, substantial, not a couple of bucks this year and a buck next year. They would like a substantial raise this year,” Goodner said.

Climate change will have altered up to 87% of ocean environments by 2060

Rob Waugh
·Contributor
Mon, 15 November 2021

Areas such as Galapagos could be threatened. (Getty)

The devastating effects of climate change are all too visible on land in the form of extreme weather events, but it’s changing conditions underwater too.

Most ocean environments will change due to climate change and it could have huge knock-on effects both on sea life and on communities which depend on it.

The researchers found that 60% to 87% of the ocean is expected to experience multiple biological and chemical changes, such as increases in water temperature, higher levels of acidity and changes in oxygen levels, by the year 2060.

The rate of change is expected to be even higher, 76% to 97%, in very large marine protected areas such as Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and the Galapagos Marine Reserve in Ecuador.

Watch: What will the world look like in 2030, 2040, 2050?



"What we're looking at here is the potential extinction of a whole environment," said Watson, who specialises in marine social-ecological systems and understanding complex adaptive systems.

"In some places, the environments we have today are not going to exist in the future. We won't be able to go visit them or experience them. It is an environmental, cultural and economic loss we can't replace."

Read more: Why economists worry that reversing climate change is hopeless

Increases in pH, which measures ocean acidity, are expected as soon as 2030.

Ocean acidification reduces the amount of carbonate in seawater, which is necessary for marine organisms, such as corals and molluscs like oysters, to develop their shells and skeletons.

The findings were published this week in the journal One Earth.

Using the last 50 years of ocean conditions as a measure of stability, the researchers used several climate models to see how six variables affecting ocean conditions might change as the planet warms.

They used three warming scenarios with increasing degrees of severity.

Read more: A 1988 warning about climate change was mostly right

Steven Mana'oakamai Johnson, a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University said,"Our scenarios included likely, unlikely and highly unlikely degrees of warming, all of which are warmer today than they were 20 years ago.

“In all three scenarios, conditions in more than half of the ocean are going to be novel, meaning new and significantly different, than they have been in the last 50 years."

Much of the change occurs in the ocean's two extremes: the tropics and the Arctic. The warmest places are seeing warming conditions never seen before, and the coldest places, like the Arctic, are no longer as cold as they once were.

The researchers also found that most of those changes will occur by 2060, though most of the change in pH, or acidity, levels is expected much sooner, by the end of the decade.

Read more: Melting snow in Himalayas drives growth of green sea slime visible from space

The change is more pronounced for the very large marine protected areas that are designed to preserve threatened species and rare habitats such as coral reefs around the world. As ocean conditions change, animals in those protected areas are likely to seek other locations that are more favorable for their survival.

"These marine protected areas are an important tool for achieving conservation goals and can take a lot of political and social will to establish and work as intended," Johnson said.

"In our analysis, 28 out of 29 of these areas will experience changes in conditions that could undermine conservation goals."

Scientists are racing to save the Last Ice Area, an Arctic Noah’s Ark

The goal to preserve summer sea ice, and the creatures that depend on it, is ambitious

Scientists are pinning their hopes on building a sanctuary for Arctic species in the Last Ice Area (seen here), the region of the Arctic where summer sea ice will last longest.
ROBERT NEWTON/LAMONT-DOHERTY EARTH OBSERVATORY

By Freda Kreier
NOVEMBER 15, 2021

It started with polar bears.

In 2012, polar bear DNA revealed that the iconic species had faced extinction before, likely during a warm period 130,000 years ago, but had rebounded. For researchers, the discovery led to one burning question: Could polar bears make a comeback again?

Studies like this one have emboldened an ambitious plan to create a refuge where Arctic, ice-dependent species, from polar bears down to microbes, could hunker down and wait out climate change. For this, conservationists are pinning their hopes on a region in the Arctic dubbed the Last Ice Area — where ice that persists all summer long will survive the longest in a warming world.

Here, the Arctic will take its last stand. But how long the Last Ice Area will hold on to its summer sea ice remains unclear. A computer simulation released in September predicts that the Last Ice Area could retain its summer sea ice indefinitely if emissions from fossil fuels don’t warm the planet more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, which is the goal set by the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement (SN: 12/12/15). But a recent report by the United Nations found that the climate is set to warm 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100 under current pledges to reduce emissions, spelling the end of the Arctic’s summer sea ice (SN: 10/26/21).

Nevertheless, some scientists are hoping that humankind will rally to curb emissions and implement technology to capture carbon and other greenhouse gases, which could reduce, or even reverse, the effects of climate change on sea ice. In the meantime, the Last Ice Area could buy ice-dependent species time in the race against extinction, acting as a sanctuary where they can survive climate change, and maybe one day, make their comeback.

Ecosystem of the frozen sea

The Last Ice Area is a vast floating landscape of solid ice extending from the northern coast of Greenland to Canada’s Banks Island in the west. This region, roughly the length of the West Coast of the United States, is home to the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic, thanks to an archipelago of islands in Canada’s far north that prevents sea ice from drifting south and melting in the Atlantic.

As sea ice from others part of the Arctic rams into this natural barrier, it piles up, forming long towering ice ridges that run for kilometers across the frozen landscape. From above, the area appears desolate. “It’s a pretty quiet place,” says Robert Newton, an oceanographer at Columbia University and coauthor of the recent sea ice model, published September 2 in Science. “A lot of the life is on the bottom of the ice.”

The muddy underbelly of icebergs is home to plankton and single-celled algae that evolved to grow directly on ice. These species form the backbone of an ecosystem that feeds everything from tiny crustaceans all the way up to beluga whales, ringed seals and polar bears.

These plankton and algae species can’t survive without ice. So as summer sea ice disappears across the Arctic, the foundation of this ecosystem is literally melting away. “Much of the habitat Arctic species depend on will become uninhabitable,” says Brandon Laforest, an Arctic expert at World Wildlife Fund Canada in Montreal. “There is nowhere else for these species to go. They’re literally being squeezed into the Last Ice Area.”

The Last Ice Area extends across national borders, making it especially challenging to protect the last summer sea ice in the Arctic. The extent of the ice is predicted to shrink considerably by 2039.WWF CANADA

The last stronghold of summer ice provides an opportunity to create a floating sanctuary —an Arctic ark if you will — for the polar bears and many other species that depend on summer ice to survive. For over a decade, WWF Canada and a coalition of researchers and Indigenous communities have lobbied for the area to be protected from another threat: development by industries that may be interested in the region’s oil and mineral resources.

“The tragedy would be if we had an area where these animals could survive this bottleneck, but they don’t because it’s been developed commercially,” Newton says.

But for Laforest, protecting the Last Ice Area is not only a question of safeguarding arctic creatures. Sea ice is also an important tool in climate regulation, as the white surface reflects sunlight back into space, helping to cool the planet. In a vicious cycle, losing sea ice helps speed up warming, which in turn melts more ice.

And for the people who call the Arctic home, sea ice is crucial for food security, transportation and cultural survival, wrote Inuit Circumpolar Council Chair Okalik Eegeesiak in a 2017 article for the United Nations. “Our entire cultures and identity are based on free movement on land, sea ice and the Arctic Ocean,” Eegeesiak wrote. “Our highway is sea ice.”

The efforts of these groups have borne some fruit. In 2019, the Canadian government moved to set aside nearly a third of the Last Ice Area as protected spaces called marine preserves. Until 2024, all commercial activity within the boundaries of the preserves is forbidden, with provisions for Indigenous peoples. Conservationists are now asking these marine preserves to be put under permanent protection.
Rifts in the ice

However, there are some troubling signs that the sea ice in the region is already precarious. Most worrisome was the appearance in May 2020 of a Rhode Island—sized rift in the ice at the heart of the Last Ice Area. Kent Moore, a geophysicist at the University of Toronto, says that these unusual events may become more frequent as the ice thins. This suggests that the Last Ice Area may not be as resilient as we thought, he says.

This is something that worries Laforest. He and others are skeptical that reversing climate change and repopulating the Arctic with ice-dependent species will be possible. “I would love to live in a world where we eventually reverse warming and promote sea ice regeneration,” he says. “But stabilization seems like a daunting task on its own.”

Still, hope remains. “All the models show that if you were to bring temperatures back down, sea ice will revert to its historical pattern within several years,” says Newton.

To save the last sea ice — and the creatures that depend on it — removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere will be essential, says oceanographer Stephanie Pfirman of Arizona State University in Tempe, who coauthored the study on sea ice with Newton. Technology to capture carbon, and prevent more carbon from entering the atmosphere, already exists. The largest carbon capture plant is in Iceland, but projects like that one have yet to be implemented on a major scale.

Without such intervention, the Arctic is set to lose the last of its summer ice before the end of the century. It would mean the end of life on the ice. But Pfirman, who suggested making the Last Ice Area a World Heritage Site in 2008, says that humankind has undergone big economic and social changes — like the kind needed to reduce emissions and prevent warming — in the past. “I was in Germany when the [Berlin] wall came down, and people hadn’t expected that to happen,” she says.

Protecting the Last Ice Area is about buying time to protect sea ice and species, says Pfirman. The longer we can hold on to summer sea ice, she says, the better chance we have at bringing arctic species —from plankton to polar bears — back from the brink.