It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, December 16, 2023
Navigating climate challenges: UVA engineers and environmental scientists aid Virginia’s eastern shore
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE
IMAGE:
AS PART OF UVA's Environmental Institute, PROFESSORS VENKAT LAKSHMI AND JONATHAN GOODALL LEAD UVA CLIMATE RESILIENCE PROJECTS LIKE THE CLIMATE EQUITY ATLAS
Since the Virginia Eastern Shore land mass is no more than 50 feet above sea level at any given point, it easily succumbs to saltwater intrusion, accelerated sea-level rise and storm flooding intensified by climate change. Saturated soil and swells of ground water destabilize buildings and can eventually cause the collapse of barns and homes. Farmland with elevated salinity cannot produce a healthy harvest — crops fail. Coastal erosion wears away soil and eliminates land altogether.
The predicament has been described as “too much” and “too little” — too much water where it’s not needed, for example intrusion and erosion, and too little where it is needed, such as not enough potable water.
Residents find it difficult to adapt to unpredictable environmental circumstances and their effects. Shore farmers, who have historically provided Virginia and the U.S. with a wealth of crops, now find that centuries of agriculture heritage are not enough to combat saltwater intrusion.
A group of UVA civil and environmental engineers and environmental scientists are teaming with local Shore residents on a project that aims to help these affected communities adapt to —literally and figuratively — an ever-changing landscape.
Empowering Communities with Technology
“We believe that the power of technology to transform communities and economies cannot be underestimated,” said Venkataraman Lakshmi, John L. Newcomb Professor of Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Lakshmi is one of the lead researchers on the project team.
Researchers are developing a web-based decision-support tool that will help residents deal with the challenges caused by climate change. The tool, called the Climate Equity Atlas, combines historical environmental data and socioeconomic data to create a sophisticated predictive tool that residents can use to make informed choices.
For instance, if your home collapses, where should you build a new one where the same incident will not occur again? Where is it most affordable to build? If your crops are ruined, is there a place on the Shore where the soil will support crops long term? Are there zoning limitations?
By engaging the community through events like the 2023 Eastern Shore of Virginia Climate Equity Project Winter Workshop, they are discovering different circumstances like these, then designing the Atlas to incorporate the different scenarios and predict near-term and long-term effects of different choices.
“The Atlas will enable ‘what-if’ discussions and projections of alternative adaptation strategies,” said Majid Shafiee-Jood, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Adapting to Climate-Induced Migration and Displacement
With climate-induced migration being a stark reality, the tool is also an attempt to keep community members from leaving the area. By providing the information they can make decisions not only about housing and farming, but how to connect with shifting population hubs to sell crops, start businesses and implement economic development plans.
The Atlas is a tool for governments and municipalities, too, so they can brainstorm adaptation strategies and remediation efforts for displaced people and infrastructure challenges — then use the tool to predict the effectiveness of different choices.
“We want to be able to tell who might be impacted — and who might be disproportionately impacted — by a decision,” Shafiee-Jood said.
Aiding Vulnerable Communities
Another main goal of the tool is to make sure no populations are left stranded without a path forward. The VASEM report also stated that lower income or racially segregated neighborhoods are often located in lower-value land tracts, including floodplains or flood-prone areas, and that residents and small businesses located in such areas are less likely to have the financial tools to protect their properties or relocate to less vulnerable areas.
“The research we’ve already done through VASEM on the impact of climate change can be plugged into the Atlas design,” Goodall said. “I’m thrilled that this data can help produce a tool so that this vibrant Shore community can continue to thrive.”
“We’re providing data in a way that can help the people in that region make decisions that put them in the best position to succeed,” said Duc Tran, a Ph.D. student gathering and analyzing the vast amount of critical environmental data needed to support this tool.
The Power of Data
“We’re being relentless about getting data,” Tran continued. “Because of our research, we found out that some National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and United States Geological Survey observatories have not collected data in certain years, so there were huge gaps in the environmental data. We’re utilizing remote sensing and lidar data to have more accurate predictions because we know the limitation of data availability is inevitable.”
Tran said he knows that with each component they build, they’re creating a foundation for resilience and for holding the community together. He hopes the things they learn and design for the Eastern Shore Atlas might be used to help other coastal communities around the world who are affected by climate change.
A screen capture of the Climate Equity Atlas web interface, which is not yet live but in progress.
Plans for the web-based, interactive tool are based on synthesizing many types of data to create a predictive model.
CREDIT
Majid Shafiee-Jood
Understanding atmospheric flash droughts in the Caribbean
VIRGINIA TECH
IMAGE:
FRESH WATER RESOURCES ARE IMPACTED BY FLASH DROUGHTS IN PUERTO RICO AND THE CARIBBEAN ISLANDS.
The word “drought” typically conjures images of parched soil, dust-swept prairies, depleted reservoirs, and dry creek beds, all the result of weeks or seasons of persistently dry atmospheric conditions.
In the sun-soaked islands in the Caribbean, however, drought conditions can occur much more rapidly, with warning signs appearing too late for mediation strategies to limit agriculture losses or prevent stresses on infrastructure systems that provide clean water to communities.
Such occurrences – known as flash droughts – are the focus of a new paper authored by Assistant Professor Craig Ramseyer of the College of Natural Resources and Environment and published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology. The paper’s finding is that Caribbean Islands are uniquely susceptible to sudden droughts, and Ramseyer advocates for alternative methodologies to more accurately measure dry conditions in the region.
“The tropics have extremely intense solar radiation, so atmospheric processes tend to be expedited,” said Ramseyer, who teaches in the Department of Geography. “Despite often receiving daily rainfall, island ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to drought conditions.”
Ramseyer, whose research focuses on tropical rainfall and severe weather impacts in the Caribbean, utilized a new drought index that considers the atmospheric demand for moisture to identify drought risk conditions instead of more traditional soil moisture measurements.
“This new drought index is really developed to try to identify the first trigger of drought by focusing on evaporative demand,” said Ramseyer, who collaborated on the paper with Paul Miller ’12, M.S. ’14, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University. “Evaporative demand is a measure of how thirsty the atmosphere is and how much moisture it can collect from soil or plant matter.”
Ramseyer, who received funding for this research through a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office, stressed that identifying drying conditions earlier is a key step to limiting the impacts of droughts.
“A lot of drought observation is based on soil moisture, but in tropical environments, a decline in soil moisture is a response to other things that have already happened so you’re further down in the chain of events,” he said. “We can mitigate a lot of losses in, say, agriculture, by being able to forecast sudden, anomalous increases in evaporative demand.”
The impacts of drought conditions extend beyond agriculture: Tropical ecosystems are also strongly impacted by dry atmospheric weather conditions, and access to fresh water is a necessity for both communities in the region and a tourism industry that is a central driver for economies in the Caribbean.
A new position for atmospheric research
To better understand how that interplay of meteorological patterns impacts drought conditions, Ramseyer utilized 40 years of data from a long-term ecological research project in the El Yunque National Forest. He found that flash droughts have routinely occurred in the Caribbean and that occurrences of drought are not limited to traditional dry seasons on the island.
“In terms of climate, Puerto Rico is situated at a crossroads, buffered on the west by the El Niño southern oscillation and by the cooler North Atlantic oscillation on the east,” said Ramseyer. “Because of that, Puerto Rico has a unique geography for researching atmospheric changes.”
The looming concerns over global warming have only accelerated the need for meteorologists to better understand drought occurrences in the Caribbean and enhance monitoring of moisture conditions in the region.
“A warming planet results in more moisture available in the atmosphere overall, which means that the kinds of short-term precipitation events common to the Caribbean will increase in intensity,” said Ramseyer. “Meanwhile, droughts are becoming higher in magnitude, so climate change is altering both extremes.”
Ramseyer, who helped secure Virginia Tech’s membership in the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research this year, said developing clearer criteria for flash drought conditions is an important first step toward addressing the infrastructure challenges that Caribbean communities are likely to face.
“The key current and future issue for the Caribbean is all about finding a way to capture rainfall successfully and draw it out slowly to mitigate evaporation losses,” said Ramseyer. “Puerto Rico and all of the Caribbean have water infrastructure challenges that must be addressed to accommodate these trends.”
Geography department chair Tom Crawford said Ramseyer’s paper reflects a utilization of big data in tackling climate and meteorological challenges.
“Dr. Ramseyer’s research applies advanced computing and geospatial science to make significant contributions to the problem of flash droughts and precipitation variability broadly,” said Crawford. “In addition to his research impact, his course on Climate Data Analysis and Programming is training the next generation of researchers on cutting edge computational techniques applied to the changing climate.”
Ramseyer advocates for additional research into understanding the relationship between flash drought events and economic losses and how future drought events can be better communicated to stakeholders and communities.
POINT CLOUD OF TREES GROWING DEEP IN THE FOREST (ABOVE) AND IN FRAGMENTED FORESTS IN CENTRAL AMAZONIA, OBTAINED USING HIGHRESOLUTION TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNING (TLS). THE GREEN AREA REPRESENTS THE AMOUNT OF BIOMASS.
Using laser scanning, researchers at the University of Helsinki have mapped out how the fragmentation of forests affects tree shape in the rainforests of Brazil. The results are surprising, as they shed light on the impact of human activity on the tropical environment and, consequently, on climate change in a new way.
In tropical rainforests, trees and vegetation have adapted for millennia to obtain light, survive and grow as effectively as possible. However, the conditions have changed.
Because of clear-cutting, the area of undisturbed rainforests is decreasing. At the edges of deforested areas, temperatures rise, and there is more light. Trees are able to adapt to changes in their living conditions and environment, but how does environmental change affect the shape of trees in the tropical rainforest? There has been no overall understanding of this so far.
Associate Professor Eduardo Maeda from the University of Helsinki coordinated an international project investigating tree shapes on the edges of the tropical rainforest. Matheus Nunes, who previously worked at the University of Helsinki and is now active at the University of Maryland, headed a study where data were collected through terrestrial laser scanning to model Amazonian trees.
Edge-effects change the growth pattern of trees
The findings were recently published in the prestigious Nature Communications journal. The study clearly demonstrated that trees growing on forest edges are shaped differently from those growing deep in the forest.
“Edge effects are evidenced in the thickness of tree trunks and symmetry of canopies. By adjusting these characteristics, trees can adapt to get as much light as possible and increase their chances of survival. In spite of increasing wood production, the amount of biomass that binds carbon dioxide in this 40-year-old forest is reduced by as much as twenty percent,” says Eduardo Maeda.
It was already known that there is less biomass in fragmented forests, as tall trees are more likely to fall over on the edges.
Running carbon sink calculations anew
Tropical rainforests continue to cover large areas and constitute a carbon sink significant for Earth as a whole. The changes now observed in individual trees pertain to large areas, making the findings globally relevant.
“The effect of human activity on climate change will need to be re-evaluated. This study provides new information on the adaptation of the rainforest to environmental change, as well as tools for researchers and decision-makers who are considering how to mitigate climate change,” Maeda notes.
The researchers used remote sensing to collect data in Central Amazonia, Brazil, creating a 3D tree representation for modelling. Various tree properties, such as their ability to use water and light as well as trunk size, were used in the calculation.
The study was funded by the Research Council of Finland (decision numbers 318252, 319905 and 345472).
Ecosystems fulfil a number of vital tasks: They store carbon, clean polluted water, pollinate plants and so on. How well an ecosystem can fulfil these tasks depends largely on its biodiversity, i.e. the variety of plants, animals and microorganisms that live in it. Until now, scientists have only been able to understand the exact nature of this relationship at a local level, for example in relation to individual forest areas, meadows and ponds. The DFG (German Research Foundation) research group BETA-FOR, led by the University of Würzburg (JMU), has now succeeded in developing a statistical method that for the first time can also analyse the contributions of biodiversity between local ecosystems to the multifunctionality of entire landscapes.
"This statistical tool was urgently needed," explains Prof. Jörg Müller, spokesperson of the research group and holder of the Chair of Animal Ecology with a focus on ecological field research in our latitudes at the Department of Zoology III. "Human use is increasingly leading to the homogenisation of entire landscapes worldwide. This has consequences that are as far-reaching as they are unknown. With the help of our new method, we can analyse for the first time how the loss of heterogeneous landscapes affects not only biodiversity, but also their multifunctionality." Measures to promote biodiversity can also be evaluated in relation to the functions of the landscape - such as renaturalisation projects, the establishment of protected areas or the promotion of sustainable agriculture."
From local ecosystems to entire landscapes
And this is how it works: the new statistical method relates the different biodiversity between individual ecosystems in a landscape to the overall multifunctionality. The term "multifunctionality" refers to the bundle of all functions that an ecosystem performs simultaneously. It breaks down the multifunctionality of a landscape into two components - the functions at the local level and those between different ecosystems in a landscape. This way, multifunctionality can be related to local biodiversity and to the biodiversity created by the diversity of habitats.
The new tool, a R Package called MF.beta4, was developed by the DFG research group BETA-FOR in cooperation with the renowned statistician and mathematician Anne Chao from the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. With this development, the group has achieved one of its central scientific goals.
About the DFG research group BETA-FOR
The DFG project "Enhancing the structural diversity between patches for improving multidiversity and multifunctionality in production forests" focusses on the relationship between biodiversity, ecosystem services and their stability. In BETA-FOR, the influence of different forest management practices on biodiversity is being investigated experimentally. A transdisciplinary consortium of researchers from the fields of biology, ecology, forestry, remote sensing and statistics is recording and analysing around 20 ecosystem functions and species groups in 11 forests in Germany.
Original publication
Hill-Chao numbers allow decomposing gamma multifunctionality into alpha and beta components. Anne Chao, Chun-Huo Chiu, Kai-Hsiang Hu, Fons van der Plas, Marc W. Cadotte, Oliver Mitesser, Simon Thorn, Akira S. Mori, Michael Scherer-Lorenzen, Nico Eisenhauer, Claus Bässler, Benjamin M. Delory, Heike Feldhaar, Andreas Fichtner, Torsten Hothorn, Marcell K. Peters, Kerstin Pierick, Goddert von Oheimb, Jörg Müller. Ecology Letters. 2023 Dec 10. DOI: 10.1111/ele.14336
In southern China, the genetically improved slash pine (Pinus elliottii) plays a crucial role in timber and resin production, with new shoot density being a key growth trait. Current manual counting methods are inefficient and inaccurate. Emerging technologies such as UAV-based RGB imaging and deep learning (DL) offer promising solutions. However, DL methods face challenges in global feature capture, necessitating additional mechanisms. Innovations like the Vision Transformer and its derivatives (e.g., TransCrowd, CCTrans) show potential in plant trait counting, offering simplified and more effective approaches for large-scale and accurate data processing. This technological evolution presents an opportunity for research in automated new shoot detection in slash pines, utilizing these advanced DL methodologies.
In the detection of slash pine trees, models like YOLOv5, Efficientnet, and YOLOX were compared, using a 0.5 threshold for tree identification. YOLOX demonstrated superior precision, recall, and average precision(AP), especially at a higher 0.75 threshold. In contrast, Faster-RCNN showed the lowest performance. Manual counting of 26 test images revealed that YOLOX had a lower false detection rate and EfficientNet had minimal missed targets. YOLOX excelled in complex and overlapping target scenarios. For the detection of new shoots, the study compared balanced and unbalanced OT frameworks, while assessing different transposition cost matrices. The perspective-guided model displayed the best performance, validating the efficacy of nonequilibrium OT for density regression. SPSC-net achieved the lowest MSE and MAE among all models, outperforming DM-Count, CSR-net, and MCNN. Scatter plots and density maps demonstrated the high prediction accuracy of the SPSC-net. On this basis the study developed CountShoots, a system of extracting and counting slash pine. Implemented on the Flask framework, it features modules for user interaction, model loading, plant extraction, and shoot counting. The process involves uploading images, extracting plant data, counting shoots, and providing feedback on the results, all streamlined for user convenience. The study confirmed the effectiveness of the SPSC-net in multiscale image processing of slash pine. YOLOX and SPSC-net were compared with other models, demonstrating superior detection and counting accuracy. SPSC-net's self-attention mechanism and feature pyramid fusion enable detailed and semantically rich feature extraction. Despite its success, there are limitations to consider, such as potential obstruction from the canopy layer and restriction on UAV flight height.
In conclusion, the research developed a comprehensive pipeline using SPSC-net and YOLOX for accurate slash pine shoot counting and crown detection, offering a robust tool for forestry research and genetic breeding of slash pine.
1College of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Agricultural University, No. 61, Daizong Road, Taian 271018, Shandong Province, China.
2AgResearch Ltd., Christchurch 8140, New Zealand.
3Department of Computer Science, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland 1010, New Zealand.
4School of Forestry, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, 8041 Christchurch, New Zealand.
5Research Institute of Subtropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry, No. 73, Daqiao Road, Fuyang, Hangzhou 311400, Zhejiang Province, China.
About Yanjie Li
He is an associate professor at the Research Institute of Subtropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry. His research interests include genetic breeding and germplasm resource evaluation, mainly focusing on the rapid estimation and evaluation of high-throughput forest germplasm resource phenotypes in important timber species in subtropical areas such as Pinus wetland, Pinus torch pine and Sassafras.
Scientists measure the distance to stars by their music
Astronomers has used asteroseismology, or the study of stellar oscillations, to accurately measure the distance of stars from the Earth and check the measurements taken during the Gaia mission to study the near Universe
For most of us, the countless bright spots in the nighttime sky all seem to be stars. But in fact, some of those spots are actually planets, or distant suns, or even entire galaxies located billions of light years away. Just what you’re looking at depends on how far it is from Earth. That’s why measuring the exact distance to celestial objects is such an important goal for astronomers – and one of the biggest challenges they’re currently tackling.
It was with this in mind that the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Gaia mission ten years ago. Data collected by the Gaia satellite are opening up a window into the near Universe, providing astronomic measurements – such as position, distance from the Earth and movement – on nearly two billion stars.
At EPFL, the Standard Candles and Distances research group headed by Prof. Richard Anderson is aiming to measure the current expansion of the Universe and sees Gaia as a valuable tool. “Gaia increased by a factor of 10,000 the number of stars whose parallaxes are measured thanks to a massive gain in accuracy over its predecessor, the ESA Hipparcos mission,” he says. Today, scientists use parallaxes to calculate the distance to stars. This method involves measuring parallax angles, with the help of the satellite, through a form of triangulation between Gaia’s location in space, the Sun and the star in question. The farther away a star, the more difficult the measurement because parallax gets smaller the larger the distance.
Despite the resounding success of Gaia, the measurement of parallax is complex, and there remain small systematic effects that must be checked and corrected in order for Gaia parallaxes to reach their full potential. This is what scientists from EPFL and the University of Bologna, in Italy, have been working on, through calculations performed on over 12,000 oscillating red giant stars* – the biggest sample size and most accurate measurements to date.
“We measured the Gaia biases by comparing the parallaxes reported by the satellite with parallaxes of the same stars that we determined using asteroseismology,” says Saniya Khan, a scientist in Anderson’s research group and the lead author of a study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Stellar earthquakes
In the same way that geologists study the Earth’s structure using earthquakes, astronomers use asteroseismology, and specifically stars’ vibrations and oscillations, to glean information about their physical properties. Stellar oscillations are measured as tiny variations in light intensity and translated into sound waves, giving rise to a frequency spectrum of these oscillations.
“The frequency spectrum lets us determine how far away a star is, enabling us to obtain asteroseismic parallaxes,” says Khan. “In our study, we listened to the ‘music’ of a vast number of stars – some of them 15,000 light-years away!”
To turn sounds into distance measurements, the research team started with a simple fact. The speed with which sound waves propagate across space depends on the temperature and density of the star’s interior. “By analyzing the frequency spectrum of stellar oscillations, we can estimate the size of a star, much like you can identify the size of a musical instrument by the kind of sound it makes – think of the difference in pitch between a violon and a cello,” says Andrea Miglio, a full professor at the University of Bologna’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and the study’s third author.
Sophisticated analyses
Having thus calculated a star’s size, the astronomers then determined its luminosity and compared this figure to the luminosity perceived here on Earth. They coupled this information with temperature and chemical-composition readings obtained from spectroscopy and ran these data through sophisticated analyses to calculate the distance to the star. Finally, the astronomers compared the parallaxes obtained in this process with those reported by Gaia in order to check the accuracy of the satellite’s measurements.
“Asteroseismology is the only way we can check Gaia’s parallax accuracy across the full sky – that is, for both low- and high-intensity stars,” says Anderson. And the future of this field is bright, as Khan outlines:
“Upcoming space missions like TESS and PLATO intended to detect and survey exoplanets will employ asteroseismology and deliver the required datasets across increasingly large regions of the sky. Methods similar to ours will therefore play a crucial role in improving Gaia's parallax measurements, which will help us pinpoint our place in the Universe and benefit a plethora of subfields of astronomy and astrophysics.”
Scientists measure the distance to stars by their music
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
15-Dec-2023
Caught napping? Grey reef sharks resting changes what we know about how they breathe
A first report of grey reef sharks resting under reef ledges in Seychelles changes what we know about how they breathe (they don’t need to swim continuously to stay alive) – and re-opens the case for the science of sleeping sharks
Predators in perpetual motion. Sleepless in our seas. If that’s your image of sharks, you’re not alone. And for good reason: sharks must swim to breathe (or so we were told). The science of how sharks sleep and breathe is linked, and while all sharks use gills to breathe, there are two ways that they move oxygen-rich sea water over those gills. Some sharks, called obligate ram ventilators, ‘ram’ oxygen-rich sea water over their gills and need to keep moving to do so. Other species, called buccal pumpers, actively pump sea water over their gills while stationary.
Science today tells us that sharks can be still – and there is some suggestion that they sleep. But there is no solid evidence of sleep behaviour in ram ventilators. Scientists have hypothesised that they don’t sleep at all, or they sleep using half their brain (like sperm whales and bottlenose dolphins), or they sleep facing into ocean currents.
A new paper ‘Just keep swimming? Observations of resting behaviour in grey reef sharks Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos (Bleeker, 1856)’, published this month in Journal of Fish Biology up-ends what we know about one obligate ram ventilator. The grey reef shark is an Endangered reef dweller in the family Carcharhinidae and was the quintessential representative of a shark that moves to breathe. ‘On routine survey dives around D’Arros we found grey reef sharks resting under coral reef ledges,’ begins Dr Robert Bullock, the director of research at the Save Our Seas D’Arros Research Centre (SOSF-DRC) in Seychelles. ‘This is not something we believed they could do. The grey reef shark has been considered a ram-ventilating species, unable to rest, so to find these ones resting turns our fundamental understanding of them on its head.’
The researchers encountered grey reef sharks resting alone and in groups at different sites around Seychelles. And through it all, the sharks seemed blissfully unaware of their observers. It’s a key observation: scientists think that increases in arousal thresholds count as the hallmark of sleep rather than just rest. The sharks remained still, except for lower jaw movements that suggest these ram-ventilating sharks can switch to buccal pumping behaviour. With little to no currents at the sites and sharks at rest facing in all directions, it seems the idea that the only way they’d rest is facing into currents holds little water for grey reef sharks. Craig Foster, founder of the SeaChange Project, was one of the divers and authors of the paper. ‘There is something very special,’ he says, ‘about “tiptoeing” around underwater at a depth of 25 metres and looking into the open eyes of sleeping sharks, moving carefully so as not to wake the peaceful beauties.’
‘I love things that challenge our current thinking, and I’ve always thought of the grey reef shark as a clear example of a species that needs to swim to breathe. Clearly not from this discovery!’ Dr James Lea, the CEO of the Save Our Seas Foundation, is enthusiastic about what the paper portends. ‘This raises all kinds of other questions,’ he declares. ‘How are they coping? How long for? How often? We have so much to learn still and to me that’s exciting.’
If the grey reef shark can switch its mode of breathing, and rest, there’s more to uncover about similar sharks. ‘It’s key to understanding how they use their environment and also how this may change in response to shifts in environmental conditions,’ explains Dr Lea. ‘How important is this rest, or possible sleep, for the sharks? And what’s the impact on them if they can’t get that rest if conditions change, such as oxygen levels rising or falling due to a changing climate?’
The authors all agree that this discovery also says a lot about our own relationship with the natural world. ‘I hope that these findings serve as a reminder of how much we still do not know and how exciting that is. Science is about being wrong quite a lot. And that’s OK,’ reflects Dr Bullock. Mr Foster believes that what we know about the wild is critical to conservation. ‘Knowing how our shark kin sleep is to be closer to their fascinating world and to wake up from our own slumber and realise we cannot live without these magnificent marine beings,’ he states.
Believed to be predators in perpetual motion, grey reef sharks had previously only been observed in motion, leading most to believe they needed to swim in order to breath.
Founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2003, the Save Our Seas Foundation (SOSF) is a philanthropic organisation whose ultimate goal is to create a legacy of securing the health and sustainability of our oceans, and the communities that depend on them, for generations to come.
Its support for research, conservation and education projects worldwide focuses on endangered sharks, rays and skates. Three permanent SOSF research and education centres reinforce its actions in Seychelles, South Africa and the USA.
