It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, March 21, 2023
RBC fossil fuel expansion funding jumped 45% last year to US$10.8B: report
Iva Poshnjari, BNN Bloomberg
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Data from an environmental group shows RBC's fossil fuel expansion-related funding jumped by almost half last year to its highest level since the Paris climate agreement was reached in 2015.
Stand.earth says the bank's US$10.8 billion in funding last year to expansion projects and companies working to increase oil and gas production represents a 45 per cent rise from 2021, and that it goes against both the conclusions of the latest UN climate report and RBC's own climate commitments.
The UN report out Monday emphasized the urgency of taking more ambitious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while the International Energy Agency has previous said no new fossil fuel supply projects should be built to give the world an even chance of limiting warming to 1.5 C.
RBC said in its latest climate report out earlier in March that its lending and financed emissions are reflective of Canada's economy, and that a balanced approach is needed for an orderly and inclusive energy transition.
The bank's report showed that its overall financed emissions for the oil and gas industry rose about 23 per cent last year compared with 2021, though only after significantly revising down the 2021 level on what it said was improved data.
RBC has committed to reaching net zero financed emissions by 2050, and has set interim targets for 2030, but Richard Brooks at Stand.earth says the bank's funding actions run counter to those commitments.
"It should be a trend downward, but we're seeing the opposite happening," said Brooks, climate finance director at the group.
The latest UN report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also urged increased funding to climate solutions, which he said RBC is also falling short on.
The bank has committed to providing $500 billion in sustainable finance by 2025, with about $85 billion issued last year, but Brooks said the bank is still putting about $99 towards fossil fuels for every $1 they put into renewables.
"We need all of our tools in our tool box to be aligned around this, and we certainly need our biggest banks to be aligned on this. And right now our biggest bank, RBC, is not."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 20, 2023.
Toxic oil sands spills spur Canada to boost oversight
Robert Tuttle, Bloomberg News
Canada’s federal government is stepping up environmental oversight in Alberta’s oil sands after Imperial Oil Ltd. and the provincial regulator were slow to report toxic spills.
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault has proposed a joint federal-provincial-Indigenous working group with the involvement of the oil company to address concerns about the spill. Imperial and the regulator have been asked to testify on the spill at the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.
“This slow notification to the federal government and Indigenous communities is of serious concern,” the federal ministry of Environment and Climate Change Canada said in a release Monday.
The ministry said it and Indigenous communities near Imperial’s Kearl oil sands mine weren’t made aware of two spills from a storage pond until nine months after the first of those spills happened when the Alberta Energy Regulator published an emergency order for Imperial to contain the ongoing seepage.
Imperial maintains it did notify local communities at the time of both leaks, company spokeswoman Lisa Schmidt said in an email. “We deeply regret communications during our investigation into the May incident were not regularly provided to communities following our initial notification as we did not meet their expectations,” she said.
“Imperial has committed to taking the necessary steps to improve our communications, so this does not happen in the future,” she said.
An email to the Alberta Energy Regulator seeking comment was not immediately returned.
The seepages, in May and February, were deemed harmful to fish and, on March 10, enforcement officers issued a directive requiring Imperial to take immediate action to prevent leaks from entering fish-bearing waters.
Communities including Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and Mikisew Cree First Nation have expressed continuing concern for their health and safety, the ministry said. The federal government has approved funding to ship bottled water to the Mikisew Cree First Nation but local drinking water has been found to meet Canadian standards.
U.S. banking crisis: ‘Banks are very fragile,’ professor says
NYU Stern Professor of Economics Lawrence J. White joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the state of the U.S. banking system, UBS’s emergency rescue of Credit Suisse, and the outlook for the global economy.
Expect more consolidation in U.S. regional banks: Julian Klymochko
Julian Klymochko, CEO and CIO of Accelerate Fintech, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss his take on UBS’ decision to buy Credit Suisse. Klymochko says that he does expect more M&A activity in U.S. regional banks and says that shareholders of these small banks should be concerned. He says that some of these failing banks represent very attractive buys to the bigger players and talks about the implications for TD’s acquisition of First Horizon Bank now that times are tough.
Canada’s financial system has strength to weather banking turmoil: Freeland
Holly McKenzie-Sutter, BNN Bloomberg
Canada’s finance minister stressed Monday that the country’s financial institutions are set up to weather the chaos roiling the banking world.
“We have strong institutions, and we have a financial system that has proven its strength time and again,” Chrystia Freeland said in a Monday speech.
“Our financial institutions have the capital they need to weather periods of turbulence.”
She made the comments in Oshawa, Ont., after Sunday night’s news that USB would buy the beleaguered Credit Suisse Group AG, narrowly avoiding a meltdown at the Swiss lender that many feared could spread to other banks and potentially lead to a snowballing financial crisis.
Freeland said Monday that prudent risk management is “a hallmark of Canadian banks,” and a guiding principle for financial regulators. She said Canada is monitoring the financial situation and talking with allies.
“Canadians can and should be confident that at a time of global uncertainty, there is no better place to be than Canada,” she said.
Freeland spoke just over a week before the federal Liberal government is set to introduce its annual budget. She promised “fiscal restraint” along with targeted aid for Canadians hit hardest by high inflation.
She also referenced a previously announced health-care spending plan and “clean economy” spending on things such as electric vehicle batteries and mining for critical minerals.
Insurers Are Totaling EVs For Minor Battery Issues, And That’s A Problem For Everyone
Batteries cost a lot to replace, raising insurance premiums and damaging the environment
by Sebastien Bell
Proprietary battery systems and the novelty of the technology mean that repairing even minor faults in electric vehicles can be extremely difficult, not to mention costly too. That leads numerous insurance companies to simply scrap EVs with only minor faults, which is problematic not only for insurers, but owners and the environment as well.
This even affects vehicles involved in minor accidents whose battery packs have only a small amount of damage. Insurers and mechanics complain that there’s no simple way to check on the status of the batteries, meaning it has to be thrown out completely lest the companies face liability in the event of future faults, reports Reuters.
As a result, insurers are opting to simply total the vehicles. That pushes up the price of insuring EVs, which can cost as much as 27 percent more than vehicles with combustion engines, according to some sources.
Now, insurers call on automakers to make it easier to access data and repair battery packs. Some have responded, with GM, Ford, and Nissan all claiming that they have developed ways to make repairs possible. GM in particular noted that their latest Ultium batteries were engineered to be repaired at the module level making them “significantly less expensive than replacing the entire battery pack” adding that they allow third-party access to battery data.
Not all automakers are quite as committed, however. Tesla, America’s biggest EV manufacturer, is investing in a new battery technology with larger cells that are glued into the pack. According to automotive expert and repair advisor Sandy Munro, the new pack has “zero repairability” adding that, “a Tesla structural battery pack is going straight to the grinder.”
That not only poses a problem for owners and insurers, but for the environment, too. In addition to being the most expensive part of a vehicle, the battery is also the most carbon intensive.
“The number of cases is going to increase, so the handling of batteries is a crucial point,” Christoph Lauterwasser, managing director of the Allianz Center for Technology, told Reuters. “If you throw away the vehicle at an early stage, you’ve lost pretty much all advantage in terms of CO2 emissions,” he said.
In order for EVs to be more ecological than combustion vehicles, they have to be on the road for a number of miles so that their zero emissions make up for their larger manufacturing carbon footprint. But with more and more unused battery packs finding their ways into junkyards, the advantages of those EVs are not realized.
Car insurance firms want EV battery pack data, threatening higher premiums
Car insurance companies are threatening automakers with increasing premiums if they don’t open their EV battery data to third parties.
By far, the most expensive part of any electric vehicle is its battery; hence, when an EV gets into an accident, it is the firm thing that is checked for damage. However, with many brands keeping battery information locked away, insurers claim they are being forced to prematurely total vehicles simply because they cannot accurately assess the damage. To get automakers to open their data and make their batteries more repairable, insurers are now threatening to continue to increase premiums.
As initially reported by Reuters, the push from insurers follows a dramatic increase in the number of EVs on the road and hence, a dramatic increase in the number of EVs involved in accidents. But what happens after an accident has become highly dependent on a driver’s insurer and the brand of EV they drive.
Sadly, in the case of most Tesla drivers, the battery or entire car must be replaced following a crash. If any internal battery components are damaged, they can be dangerous if driven again. This is only compounded by Tesla’s infamous lack of repairability.
According to a series of Tesla stores contacted by Teslarati, the most common outcome if a battery is damaged is to replace the entire car, as often the damage to the battery, combined with the damage to the body and electronics, totals the vehicle. However, it should be noted that Tesla offers battery replacement as part of their service for those willing to pay.
In the case of Ford, Nissan, or GM vehicles, owners are in a slightly better situation. According to comments given to Reuters, these automakers have designed some, if not most, parts of the battery pack to be replaceable in the case of an accident. Ford states that outside casing materials have been designed for replacement, while GM explained that specific battery cells could be identified by GM dealers for replacement, preventing the need for an entirely new battery pack. Nissan states that battery modules can be replaced in the case of an accident.
Stellantis brands, much like Tesla, will not do battery pack repair and states that any electric vehicle in an accident where the airbags are deployed must have its battery replaced.
None of the automakers have commented on opening their battery data to insurers or third parties, though they may be forced to if customers continue to see their premiums climb.
This reaction from insurers is one of the fundamental reasons Tesla established its own insurance provider. However, as the program remains locked to specific states, only a limited number of Tesla owners can qualify for the service. But if Tesla continues to expand its service to cover more States, other insurers may have no choice but to lower their premiums for Tesla owners to remain competitive.
What do you think of the article? Do you have any comments, questions, or concerns? Shoot me an email at william@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @WilliamWritin. If you have news tips, email us at tips@teslarati.com!
By studying lizards, researchers reveal the forces that shape biodiversity
Researchers in U of T’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology studied anoles on the islands of Jamaica and Hispaniola to better understand what determines biodiversity. Credit: Luke Mahler
"If you pick a spot in, say, a rainforest, and count the number of different species of lizards within 15 meters and you come up with a number," asks Luke Mahler, "what determines that number?"
Mahler is an assistant professor in the University of Toronto's department of ecology and evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts & Science. He studies how the interplay of ecological and evolutionary forces over time and space results in the biodiversity we see in different habitats. He does this primarily by studying Anolis lizards—aka anoles—small, tree-dwelling reptiles in tropical regions of the Americas.
What determines the number of different species in local communities of animals? The question is a long-standing ecological problem for which there has been no consensus.
"Is it because of local processes like competition for food or territory?" Mahler asks. "Or is it the result of broader, regional processes like the generation of new species by evolution?"
One hypothesis suggests the determining force is local competition. In other words, if a local community—for example, a particular patch of forest on a tropical island—is "full up" with several species, then additional species wouldn't be able to persist because every ecological niche is already occupied.
Anole lizards are small, tree-dwelling reptiles. Credit: Luke Mahler
But according to another hypothesis, the diversity of species in such an area isn't limited by a pre-existing number of niches. Instead, the most important factor determining the number of species in a local community is the diversity of the broader region.
"On an island with a small total number of species, local communities should have only a small number of species," Mahler explains. "But on an island that has many species, you should see many species in local communities. In other words, local diversity is essentially a reflection of broader diversity, with classic ecological processes like competition mattering very little.
"If regional diversity determines what you see at a local site, then that local diversity is ultimately determined by the large-scale evolutionary processes that created the regional diversity."
To answer the question of local versus regional, Mahler and his colleagues studied anoles on the Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Hispaniola. What the researchers found was evidence for an unexpected third option—one that required marrying elements of both the "local" and "regional" hypotheses.
They found that the diversity of species in local communities indeed seems to be determined by local ecological processes that cap species diversity—but only if regional evolutionary forces have already produced the kinds of species that can monopolize local ecological resources. For example, the rich evolutionary diversity of species on Hispaniola, a large and ancient island, has "fed" a wealth of specialized species into the local communities at higher elevations on that island.
Why? Hispaniola's diversity—which stems from evolution playing out over millions of years across a very large and complex area—has led to unique anole species that exist only in the highlands. These species have filled all the available ecological niches, precluding more species from joining local communities there.
In contrast, Jamaica is smaller in area, especially in the highlands. And while many anole species have evolved on the island, the relative lack of space in the highlands hasn't allowed the evolution of new highland-specialist species as it has on Hispaniola. In fact, there is only one distinct highland anole in Jamaica.
Put another way, local diversity is determined by both regional and local forces but in different ways. Regional forces produce a diverse set of species, which then compete with one another, establishing local limits on diversity in any given location. But if a region is lacking in "evolutionary opportunity" because it's too small or too young, it fails to produce a diverse assembly of species and local limits are never reached.
Mahler and his colleagues described these findings in their study, published recently in the journal Ecology Letters. Co-authors included Luke Frishkoff, who started working on the research as a post-doctoral researcher in Mahler's lab and who is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, and Gavia Lertzman-Lepofsky, a Ph.D. candidate currently in Mahler's lab.
The "laboratories" in which Mahler and his colleagues conducted their research—Jamaica and Hispaniola—were chosen because they are similar in many ways. They are situated at the same latitude, have matching topography and have similar forest habitats.
Every summer from 2016 to 2018, the researchers counted the number of anole species in dozens of 30-meter diameter plots on both islands from sea level to an altitude of approximately 2,000 meters.
"The anole faunas of Jamaica and Hispaniola provide a rich opportunity for comparison because they represent a natural experiment," Mahler says. "And what we found is that local processes do matter. But they matter in such a way that it's regional opportunities for diversification that determine their strength."
"However, this is a single, if illustrative, comparison. Determining the generality of the evolutionary opportunity model we propose here awaits additional tests."
More information: Luke Owen Frishkoff et al, Evolutionary opportunity and the limits of community similarity in replicate radiations of island lizards, Ecology Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1111/ele.14098
Mark Nielsen / Prince George Citizen - Mar 20, 2023 | Story: 417063
Photo: .
An aerial view of the Meteor Lake peatland near Sinclair Mills.
Following a fundraising campaign this past fall, The Nature Trust of BC has completed the purchase of 235 hectares of wetland east of Prince George, putting the ecologically valuable property under the organization's protective wing.
Located about 100 kilometres east of the city and across the Fraser River from Sinclair Mills, the land is part of the 2,000-hectare Meteor Lake Wetlands, one of the three largest wetlands in the upper Fraser River.
"The land contains rare peatland ecosystems which absorb tremendous amounts of carbon. In addition to its climate benefits, the property provides habitat, breeding grounds, and food for threatened mammals, birds, and amphibians like the endangered White Sturgeon," Nature Trust said in a statement issued Monday.
In all, $75,000 was raised over the course of November and December 2022 to complete the purchase.
"As a result of the incredible generosity of the Prince George community and donors throughout the province, the Meteor Lake-Wetland Bog will be protected from purchase and development for generations to come," Nature Trust said.
According to the organization, peatlands are mainly found in Northern B.C. and, while they comprise three percent of the global land area they contain approximately 25 percent of global soil carbon - twice the amount absorbed by the world’s forests
Greta Thunberg targeted with misleading headlines about deleted tweet
Headlines shared on social media say climate activist Greta Thunberg deleted a 2018 tweet that predicted the world would end in five years after the projection failed to come true. This is misleading; the Swedish environmentalist's post -- which has been taken down -- quoted an article on a scientist who described action he said was needed to prevent the melting of ice at the poles.
"Greta Thunberg deletes 2018 tweet saying world will end in 2023 after world does not end," says text in an image shared March 13, 2023 on Facebook and Instagram.
The posts quote a headline published March 11 by The Post Millennial, a conservative Canadian website. The article accumulated more than 1,400 shares, according to CrowdTangle, a social media insights tool.
The story cites a June 21, 2018 tweet from Thunberg that said: "'A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.'"
Screenshot of a Facebook post taken March 17, 2023
Thunberg, then aged 15, published the post two months before she started the school pupils' strike in Sweden that put her in the global spotlight.
The tweet has since been deleted. But a version archived March 7, 2023 shows Thunberg was quoting a February 2018 article from Grit Post, a now-defunct liberal website in the US.
The story cites James Anderson, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard University who is credited with discovering the Antarctic hole in the ozone layer.
Grit Post reported on a January 2018 speech in which Anderson said there was a five-year timeframe for transforming industries to halt pollution, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reflect sunlight from the Earth's poles.
"The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero," Anderson said, according to articles from Grit Post and Forbes, an American business magazine.
The stories did not quote Anderson saying the world would end within that timeframe.
AFP reached out to Thunberg for comment, but a response was not forthcoming.
Arctic sea ice decreasing
The US National Snow and Ice Data Center said March 15 that the annual maximum extent of Arctic sea ice was the lowest since satellite records began.
A 2018 study found "permanent ice" or "multiyear ice," which does not melt in the summer, had decreased by more than 50 percent from 1999 to 2017. A 2022 study concluded the amount of ice lost quadrupled from 1997 to 2021.
Scientific research reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has pointed to 2030 as a key timeframe to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the worst effects of climate change.
AFP has fact-checked other claims about climate change here.
Fact Check Did Greta Thunberg Delete Tweet Claiming Climate Change Will Wipe Out Humanity by 2023?
Numerous tweets from conservative pundits misread the claim repeated by Thunberg, GritPost, and Forbes.
Claim: Climate change activist Greta Thunberg deleted a 2018 tweet claiming climate change will "wipe out" all of humanity by 2023. Rating: Mixture
What's True
Thunberg did delete a tweet from her account from 2018 that read, "A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years." However ... What's False
... This tweet, and the underlying article, never actually asserted that humanity would end in the year 2023. What's Undetermined
It's unclear when exactly Thunberg deleted the 2018 tweet.
In March 2023, several media outlets and conservative pundits began sharing images of what they described as a deleted 2018 tweet from climate activist Greta Thunberg's account. That tweet, quoting from a now-deleted article, said, "A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years."
Climate skeptics jumped on the deleted tweet as evidence of climate alarmism, insinuating that Thunberg's tweet suggested that, if climate science was accurate, humanity should be extinct at the time of this reporting.
Several problems exist with that narrative. First and foremost is the fact that the tweet and the article it linked to never said that humanity would vanish in 2023. Second, and also of crucial importance, is the "top climate scientist" referenced in the underlying article never actually said what these reports asserted him to have said. Here, Snopes untangles the controversy. Did Thunberg Delete the Tweet?
Yes, on June 21, 2018, Thunberg tweeted a link to a now deleted article on the website GritPost bearing the headline, "Top Climate Scientist: Humans Will Go Extinct if We Don't Fix Climate Change by 2023." The GritPost article rehashed content originally published on Forbes about a seminar given by James Anderson, a Harvard University professor of atmospheric science, at the University of Chicago in 2018.
As reported by Forbes, Anderson's talk focused on the need for a massive effort to curb climate change over the next five years:
People have the misapprehension that we can recover from this state just by reducing carbon emissions, Anderson said in an appearance at the University of Chicago. Recovery is all but impossible, he argued, without a World War II-style transformation of industry—an acceleration of the effort to halt carbon pollution and remove it from the atmosphere, and a new effort to reflect sunlight away from the earth's poles. This has to be done, Anderson added, within the next five years.
The assertion that humanity would collapse as a result of this inaction stemmed from statements Forbes attributed to Anderson about declining Arctic ice:
"The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero," Anderson said, with 75 to 80 percent of permanent ice having melted already in the last 35 years. "Can we lose 75-80 percent of permanent ice and recover? The answer is no."
Based on Internet Archive records, the GritPost article to which Thunberg linked was deleted sometime after July 2020. It's not clear when Thunberg deleted her tweet — the latest archive of it identified by Snopes dates to May 2021. Thunberg did not respond to Snopes' request for comment. Did the Tweet Say What People Claim It Said?
The claim that a top climate scientist allegedly predicted the collapse of humanity in 2023 has been popular with climate skeptics since Anderson allegedly made the claim in 2018. The Forbes article and Thunberg tweet were both widely lampooned for their alarmism at the time. When 2023 came and humanity still persisted, these same actors were ready to relish the moment, as summarized by Newsweek:
[Charlie] Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, on March 12, 2023, wrote: "One of the best headlines of the year so far... 'Greta Thunberg deletes 2018 tweet saying world will end in 2023 after world does not end.'"
Filmmaker [Dinesh] D'Souza, on March 12, 2023, added: "Climate Radical Greta Thunberg Caught Red Handed: Deletes 2018 Tweet That Says World Will End Without Action by 2023."
[Brigitte] Gabriel, founder of ACT for America, on March 11, 2023, also said: "Greta Thunberg deleted this tweet because it exposes her for being a fraud. Make sure the entire world sees it."
All of these tweets misread the claim repeated by Thunberg, GritPost, and Forbes. The point, as these individuals or outlets reported, was that humanity had to reach certain carbon emission benchmarks by 2023, or else catastrophic events decades to centuries later would be guaranteed because of feedbacks in the climate system. As Forbes described:
The answer [to the question "can we lose 75-80 percent of permanent ice and recover"] is no in part because of what scientists call feedbacks, some of the ways the earth responds to warming. Among those feedbacks is the release of methane currently trapped in permafrost and under the sea, which will exacerbate warming. Another is the pending collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, which Anderson said will raise sea level by 7 meters (about 23 feet).
Conflating the years scientists claim to be so-called "tipping points" with the year in which the end result of those tipping points is supposed to emerge is a rhetorical tactic common in climate-denial circles. Snopes has previously reported on the imprecise quotes contained in a 1989 Associated Press article misused in a similar way. Did the Climate Scientist Say What the Tweets Said?
Regardless of any Thunberg tweet, the claim allegedly made by Anderson that "the chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero" has also recently been shared as evidence of climate "fraud," suggesting Anderson made a failed prediction:
The Forbes article was the only place in which the content of Anderson's seminar was reported, but Anderson told The Associated Press that he never made that argument, and that his words were wildly misinterpreted in media reports:
"That is a complete fabrication of what I said," Anderson wrote, referring to the claims he said humanity would be wiped out in five years.
He said that during the seminar, he was displaying the most recent observations of Arctic sea ice volume — specifically the ice floating on the Arctic Ocean — and made the statement that "the current observed rate of floating ice loss volume, there will be no floating ice remaining by 2022."
The focus of the statement was on the floating ice volume and the observed rate of disappearance at that time, he said.
"Thus the statement was clear to those in attendance that the reference was to floating ice volume in the data shown on the slide, not arctic ice in general," Anderson clarified, adding, "so, the 'wiping out of humanity by 2022' is a total distortion of what I said or meant at the University of Chicago colloquium in 2018. I would never make such a statement." The Bottom Line
Thunberg deleted a tweet that repeated an imprecise paraphrase of a climate scientist's 2018 seminar talk. While it is factual that she deleted this tweet, claims that the tweet argued humanity would end in 2023 are false. As such, we rate this claim as a "Mixture" of truth.
Compound and median eyes of trilobites. (a) Aulacopleura koninckii (Barrande, 1846), Silurian, Czech Republik, partly with shell preserved. (b) Holochroal compound eyes of (a). (c) Compound eye of Gerastos cuvieri (Steininger, 1831), Middle Devonian, Germany. (d) Schizochroal eye of Eldredgeops (Phacops) rana crassituberculata Stumm, 1953, Middle Devonian, USA. (e) A. koninckii, two larval stages. f) Upper specimen with location of the median eyes indicated. (g) Median eyes. (h, g) enlarged). (i) Cyclopyge sibillaŠnajdr, 1982, Ordovician, Morocco; 2 specimens, the lower larval. (j) Relevant specimen of (i). (k, j) Position of the median eyes indicated. (l) Median eyes in (j, k) indicated by white arrows. Yellow arrow: dorsal organ, comp. (h, i). Insert: dark structure in the fossil, which is not a median eye. m) Fully shelled glabella of A. koninckii (insert), no median eyes visible. (n1–4) Left median eye of C. sibilla (l), different contrasts. (o1–4) Median median eye of C. sibilla (l), different contrasts. (p1–4) right median eye of C. sibilla (l), different contrasts. Credit:Scientific Reports(2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-31089-7
Trilobites, prehistoric sea creatures, had so-called median eyes, single eyes on their foreheads, in addition to their compound eyes, research conducted by Dr. Brigitte Schoenemann at the University of Cologne's Institute of Zoology and Professor Dr. Euan Clarkson at the University of Edinburgh has now found out.
Such single eyes are found in all arthropods and also in many relatives of the extinct trilobites. They are usually small cup eyes (ocelli), sometimes even equipped with lenses, and not unlike human eyes. These so-called median eyes are typical for all arthropods, but had not yet been discovered in trilobites despite 150 years of research.
The scientists assume that these eyes were characteristic of the larval stage of the animals. The single eyes were located under a transparent layer of the carapace, which became opaque during the fossilization process. Both circumstances contributed to the ocelli not being discovered until now. The researchers also detected median eyes in other, approximately 500-million-year-old arthropods.
Depending on their evolutionary status, these arthropods had different numbers of median eyes. In future, the number and shape of the single eyes will help to classify the evolutionary status of individual arthropod species. The researchers have published their findings in Scientific Reports.
Arthropods usually have two types of eyes: compound eyes and the so-called 'median eyes' or middle eyes. The latter are located in the middle of the forehead between the compound eyes. Only trilobites, an important group of arthropods in the Paleozoic, did not seem to have had median eyes.
This was the assumption until Schoenemann and Clarkson examined a specimen of the trilobite Aulacopleura koninckii in which part of the head had been scraped off. They found three almost identically shaped dark, inconspicuous and tiny oval spots of the same size at the front of the head. These three structures are parallel to each other and fan out slightly on the underside. All three spots are characterized by a smooth, clear outline and a uniform, dark brownish color.
"This clear, regular appearance distinguishes this structure from random formations produced by decay or fossilization, and corresponds to the expected relics of simple median eyes equipped with a pigment layer. Even if it is a single find, it supports the assumption that trilobites originally had median eyes," Schoenemann explained.
In the trilobite Cyclopyge sibilla, which lived in the free ocean, the researchers also found three cup-shaped median eyes on the so-called glabella, the region in the middle of the forehead between the large compound eyes, which even apparently had a lens not unsimilar to human eyes, and were thus clearly more differentiated and probably much more efficient than those of the bottom-dwelling trilobite Aulacopleura.
In their article, the researchers also consider why the median eyes of trilobites have escaped detection until now: "These eyes are present in trilobites at the larval stage, but lie beneath what is probably a thin, transparent carapace (cuticle), which becomes opaque during fossilization. Both explain why they have remained undiscovered until now," she added.
Thus, the researchers have solved the mystery of missing middle eyes in trilobites. Schoenemann said, "These cup eyes are derived from those of the primitive stump-footed animals, so-called velvet worms, small worm-like animals with legs. The original number of median eyes is 2, which present-day, very conservative arachnids still have. In phylogenetic, very primitive arthropods (e.g. Cindarella eucalla from the lower Cambrian of China) there are 4, modern animals, such as insects and crustaceans, have only 3. With the help of the number of median eyes in an arthropod, we now have an important tool to determine its position in the evolutionary tree."
More information: Brigitte Schoenemann et al, The median eyes of trilobites, Scientific Reports (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-31089-7
