Threatened by warming waters, brook trout may be able to adapt to hotter weather

Heatwaves appear to trigger heritable gene expression changes that may help make the fish more tolerant of thermal stress, researchers report in novel study

Penn State

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Brook trout, an iconic coldwater fish species native to streams and lakes in the eastern United States and Canada, begin to experience declines in growth rate in water above 61 degrees Fahrenheit and acute heat stress above 68 degrees Fahrenheit. In this study, researchers caught, sampled and released fish in four streams in Pennsylvania. 

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Credit: Jason Keagy/Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Brook trout may have a genetic trick up their scales when it comes to adapting, with limitations, to heatwaves that threaten their existence. Scientists have known for years that brook trout — an iconic coldwater fish species native to streams and lakes in the eastern United States and Canada — are extremely vulnerable to warming temperatures, with more than half of their habitats characterized as highly sensitive and highly vulnerable to such changes by U.S. Forest Service researchers in 2010. Now, a novel study led by researchers at Penn State suggests that brook trout are capable of mounting a protective genetic response to thermal stress that can be passed on from one generation to the next.

“The responses to heat stress had a high degree of plasticity, with brook trout exhibiting the ability to acclimate and increase tolerance to higher temperatures,” said team leader Jason Keagy, assistant research professor of wildlife behavioral ecology. “Our study covered two heatwaves, and the overall change in expression patterns was more intense during the second heatwave. We think the first heatwave ‘primed’ the response for the second.”

In findings recently published in Science of the Total Environment, the researchers reported that groups of genes involved in immune response and oxygen-conveying activity were upregulated and downregulated, respectively, at higher water temperatures in two successive heat waves in July and August 2022 in four small central Pennsylvania mountain streams.

“Detecting these gene-expression fingerprints of thermal stress allows us to directly ‘ask’ the fish how they are feeling, whether they are stressed out,” Keagy said.

The team closely monitored air and water temperatures and sampled 116 brook trout at eight time points during the heatwaves in each of the four streams. Keagy and his collaborators extracted the fish’s RNA — the genetic material used to build proteins and help regulate biological functions — from their gills without injuring the fish. They sequenced the RNA, a technique that reveals the number of molecules and in what order they appear, and quantified the expression levels of 32,670 unique genetic transcripts, which carry the instructions for proteins essential for cell and tissue function. The team found that overall gene-expression patterns in response to water temperature change were similar among fish in all four streams studied.

The researchers also detected 43 genes that were differentially expressed at different time points and followed the same expression pattern during the two heatwaves. Of these genes, 42 related to water temperature. Some of these differentially expressed genes — including those producing heat-shock proteins and cold-metabolism proteins — have been linked to temperature responses in other studies, the researchers said.

Keagy noted that brook trout begin to experience declines in growth rate in water above 61 degrees Fahrenheit and acute heat stress above 68 degrees Fahrenheit, with critical thermal maximum temperatures reached near 84 degrees Fahrenheit. He explained that the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is increasing, which is predicted to reduce suitable thermal habitats for brook trout, especially when combined with other environmental changes like land-use that removes forests along streams and the introduction of non-native competitors like brown trout.

“Critically, extreme weather events can be more important drivers of extirpation — state or regional disappearance of a species — and selection than changes in annual or seasonal averages, and they pose a particularly large threat to cold-blooded organisms with body temperatures that fluctuate with their environment,” Keagy said.

Studying the gene response of fish to temperature in nature where conditions are “messy,” rather than in the controlled conditions of a lab was a complicated and challenging endeavor, Keagy pointed out.

“This study was a massive undertaking,” he said. “We identified heatwaves using local weather predictions of air temperature and then tried to capture fish at the beginning, peak, ending and one week after each heatwave. We had no way of predicting how the stream water temperatures would be responding. And yet — led by our talented graduate student Sarah Batchelor, co-author on the paper — we pulled it off quite well. Then, the data analysis was not straightforward — gene-expression studies tend to be much simpler when based in the laboratory — but our lab’s postdoctoral scholar, first author Justin Waraniak, came up with novel and creative ways to analyze the data.”

This study was the one of the firsts test of the emerging field of landscape transcriptomics, recently envisioned by an interdisciplinary team led by scientists in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences. The team, which Keagy leads, hypothesized that it would be possible to collect animals and plants from the wild and determine which stressors they experienced based on specific patterns or signatures in their gene-expression profiles. This is the second landscape transcriptomics paper published this year, with another research group in the college recently publishing on stressors in bumble bees.

“This study shows the utility of landscape transcriptomic approaches to identify important biological processes governing wild organisms’ responses to short-term stressors,” Keagy said. “The results of this study can guide future investigations to identify phenotypic and genetic diversity that contribute to adaptive responses to heatwaves and improve predictions of how brook trout populations will respond to future climate change.”

This research was supported by grants from the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences Strategic Networks and Initiatives Program and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Graduate student Sarah Batchelor, left, co-author of the study, and Julia Langlois, undergraduate research assistant, search for brook trout to sample in Big Poe Creek. 

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Jason Keagy/Penn State

Brook trout were sampled by researchers in four streams in Centre County and Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania: Big Poe, Standing Stone, East Branch Standing Stone and Shavers creeks. 

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Penn State

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Journal

Science of The Total Environment

DOI

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2025.178960 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Landscape transcriptomic analysis detects thermal stress responses and potential adaptive variation in wild brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) during successive heatwaves

Article Publication Date

18-Mar-2025

IMPORTED PILSNER URQUEL

What’s behind the ‘pop and slosh’ when opening a swing-top bottle of beer?

Determining the acoustics and physics at play behind the liquid sloshing and popping sounds that occur while opening a swing-top bottle of beer

American Institute of Physics

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A frame of the group’s high-speed recording after popping a homebrewed bottle of beer.

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Credit: Max Koch

WASHINGTON, March 18, 2025 — In a fun experiment, Max Koch, a researcher at the University of Göttingen in Germany — who also happens to be passionate about homebrewing — decided to use a high-speed camera to capture what occurs while opening a swing-top bottle of homebrew.

When Robert Mettin, who leads the Ultrasound and Cavitation group at the university’s Third Institute of Physics, Biophysics, suggested that Koch should submit the findings to the special “kitchen flows” issue of Physics of Fluids, from AIP Publishing, Koch and his colleagues chose to expand on the home experiment and delve into the novel acoustics and physics at play.

The group found that the sound emitted by opening a pressurized bottle with a swing-top lid isn’t a single shockwave, but rather a very quick “ah” sound. Their high-speed video recordings captured condensation within the bottleneck that vibrated up and down in a standing wave. These recordings, along with high-fidelity audio recordings and computational fluid dynamics simulations, confirmed that this wave is the origin of the “ah” sound.

“The pop’s frequency is much lower than the resonation if you blow on the full bottle like a whistle,” said Koch. “This is caused by the sudden expansion of the carbon dioxide and air mixture in the bottle, as well as a strong cooling effect to about minus 50 degrees Celsius, which reduces sound speed. The decibels it emits are high — inside the bottleneck it’s as loud, or even louder, than a turbine of an airplane within 1 meter, but it doesn’t last long.”

After opening the bottle, the dissolved carbon dioxide starts to form inside the beer and triggers the liquid level to rise. The motion of the bottle also causes the liquid to slosh, and the group’s high-speed recordings captured this wave within the bottleneck.

Additionally, they noticed that the momentum transfer of the lid hitting the glass with its sharp edge after popping might also trigger gushing, due to the enhanced formation of bubbles.

“It was a challenge to explain the low frequency of the ‘ah’ sound emitted by the opening and find a simple model to explain the values,” Koch said. “One thing we didn’t resolve is that our numerical simulations showed an initial strong peak in the acoustic emission before the short ‘ah’ resonance, but this peak was absent in the experimentation.”

Simulations aside, Koch joked that another great challenge was drinking the homebrewed beverages and still maintaining clarity during the experiment.

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The article “On the popping sound and liquid sloshing when opening a beer” is authored by Max Koch, Matti Tervo, Rafael Manso Sainz, Christiane Lechner, and Robert Mettin. It will appear in Physics of Fluids on March 18, 2025 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0248739). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0248739.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Physics of Fluids is devoted to the publication of original theoretical, computational, and experimental contributions to the dynamics of gases, liquids, and complex fluids. See https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pof.

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Journal

Physics of Fluids

DOI

10.1063/5.0248739 

Article Title

On the popping sound and liquid sloshing when opening a beer

Article Publication Date

18-Mar-2025

Reusing old oil and gas wells may offer green energy storage solution

Penn State

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind and solar will require better ways to store energy for use when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. A new study by researchers at Penn State found that taking advantage of natural geothermal heat in depleted oil and gas wells can improve the efficiency of one proposed energy storage solution: compressed-air energy storage (CAES).

The researchers recently published their findings in the Journal of Energy Storage.

CAES plants compress air and store it underground when energy demand is low and then extract the air to create electricity when demand is high. But startup costs currently limit commercial development of these projects, the scientists said.

The researchers proposed a new geothermal-assisted compressed-air energy storage system that makes use of depleted oil and gas wells — the Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are around 3.9 million in the United States — and found it can improve efficiency by 9.5% over the existing technology. This means a larger percentage of the energy stored in the system can be recovered and turned into electricity, potentially boosting profits for operators.  

“This improvement in efficiency can be a game changer to justify the economics of compressed-air energy storage projects,” said Arash Dahi Taleghani, professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering at Penn State and corresponding author on the study. “And on top of that, we could significantly avoid the upfront cost by using existing oil and gas wells that are no longer in production. This could be a win, win situation.”

Reusing depleted oil and gas wells would allow operators to access geothermal heat in hot rock formations underground, eliminating upfront costs of drilling new wells and potentially making the technology more appealing to industry, the scientists said.

Gases like compressed air increase in pressure as temperatures increase, meaning the heated wells could potentially store more energy, according to Taleghani. When electricity is needed, the heated, compressed air is released, driving a turbine to produce power.

“Without taking advantage of the geothermal setup, you could not get enough encouraging numbers,” Taleghani said, explaining that the team used numerical modeling simulations to find that placing CAES systems in abandoned oil and gas wells significantly increased the air temperature in the systems. “And on top of that, drilling new wells may not justify the economics of this type of storage. But by combining these two factors, and by going back and forth through modeling and simulation, we found this could be a very good solution.”

Energy storage options like CAES are particularly important in the transition to clean energy, according to the researchers, because they help address the intermittent nature of renewable sources. By storing excess renewable energy and releasing it when needed, energy storage contributes to grid stability and reliability.

“The problem is that sometimes when we need energy, there is no sunshine or there is no wind,” Taleghani said. “That’s a big barrier against further expansion of most of the renewable energy that is available to us. That’s why it's very important to have some storage capacity to support the grid.”

Repurposing depleted oil and gas wells may also help mitigate potential environmental impacts of abandoned wells and potentially provide new job opportunities in areas with rich energy industry traditions, the researchers said.

In Pennsylvania alone, regulators estimate there are hundreds of thousands of orphaned and abandoned wells. If these wells are improperly plugged, or damaged, they can leak methane into the atmosphere and groundwater.

“If we use existing wells, we are basically hitting two birds with one stone,” Taleghani said. “First, we are sealing these wells. That stops any potential leaks. And then if we are repurposing these wells for energy storage, we are still using the infrastructure that is in place in these communities. It can potentially maintain employment in the area and allow communities to be part of the energy future.”

This research was conducted as part of the Repurposing Center for Energy Transition (ReCET) at Penn State. The center seeks to repurpose fossil energy infrastructure for energy transition applications, especially in legacy energy communities.

Also contributing from Penn State were Derek Elsworth, G. Albert Shoemaker Chair in Mineral Engineering and professor of energy and geo-environmental engineering, and Qitao Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar, both in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering.

The U.S. Department of Energy supported this research.

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Journal

Journal of Energy Storage

DOI

10.1016/j.est.2025.115317 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Underground energy storage using abandoned oil & gas wells assisted by geothermal

 

Discrepancies between national climate targets and citizens' willingness to contribute to climate action

Study finds that governments are guided by ethical principles but cost-benefit considerations take priority for their citizens

University of Oldenburg

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In the bid to combat climate change, the signatory states to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change periodically submit voluntary targets specifying a percentage by which they pledge to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions (Percentage Reduction Pledges, PRPs). In an empirical study, Prof. Dr. Heinz Welsch, an environmental economist at the University of Oldenburg, Germany investigated the extent to which these "national climate targets" correspond to the willingness of the citizens of the respective countries to contribute to climate change mitigation (Willingness to Contribute, WTC) and published his findings in the journal Ecological Economics.

Welsch concludes that country-specific factors such as per-capita income, emissions levels and temperatures play a significant role for both variables (PRPs and WTC), but that whereas these factors were positively correlated to the percentage reduction pledges, they were negatively correlated to willingness to contribute – and that there is also a correlation with levels of satisfaction with democracy.

In his study Welsch compares the national climate targets of 123 nations – last agreed in 2021 – with globally representative data. Almost 130,000 people in 125 nations were surveyed in 2021 and 2022 for the Global Climate Change Survey, which was published last year. One key finding of the survey was that a large majority of the world's population supports climate protection measures: 89 percent of the respondents would like to see more political action against climate change from their national governments, and 69 percent said they would be willing to contribute one percent of their income towards measures to combat climate change.

Welsch used these data to test a model he developed to analyse the interplay between cost-benefit considerations, ethical principles and citizens' preferences. His study focused on the question of which factors are relevant in determining the climate protection targets of national governments and the willingness of citizens to contribute to climate change mitigation. It showed that "per-capita income" and "per-capita emissions" were key factors for both variables and that the average temperatures of the past decade were also relevant.

Welsch found that the higher a country's income and emissions levels, the more ambitious its government's climate targets were, whereas the opposite was the case regarding people's willingness to contribute to climate change mitigation: the higher the income and emissions, the less willing the population was to contribute to fighting climate change. Diverging trends can also be observed regarding the temperature factor: the willingness to contribute to climate protection is greater in warmer countries than in colder ones, but countries with colder climates pursue more ambitious climate targets.

The figures for Germany align with these findings: Germany was among the most ambitious countries in the last round of pledges. With an emissions reduction target of 39.7 percent for the period between 2019 and 2030, it ranked 12th out of 123 on this score. However, according to the Climate Change Survey, although willingness among the German population to contribute to climate action was also high, it was lower than in most other countries. With 67.9 percent of German respondents saying they would be willing to give up one percent of their income each month to contribute to climate action, Germany ranked 74th in the international comparison. Asked whether the government should do more to fight climate change, 86 percent of respondents said yes – leaving Germany in 89th place out of 123.

The study interprets these findings as indicative of a conflict between the United Nations' climate ethics principle of the "common but differentiated responsibilities" of states, which emphasises fairness and equity, and the cost-benefit calculations that prevail among the populations included in the analysis. "People assume that the lower the temperatures in a country are, the less impact climate change will have there," explains Welsch, At the same time people in countries with high per-capita emissions fear that climate protection measures will have a negative impact on their economy, he adds. "Cost-benefit calculations therefore make it likely that in colder, richer and more carbon-intensive countries there will be less willingness to contribute to climate protection."

"In sum, there is a discrepancy between the relatively ambitious climate targets of rich and carbon-intensive countries in colder regions and the lower levels of willingness among their populations to contribute to combating climate change," explains Welsch. The study also shows that there is a correlation between this discrepancy and lower levels of satisfaction with democracy: the more ambitious a government's climate targets compared to the population's willingness to contribute to climate protection, the lower the proportion of the population that is satisfied with the functioning of democracy in that country. "This is not necessarily a causal relationship," the environmental economist hastens to emphasise. Nevertheless, pursuing a climate policy that involves sacrifices on the part of the population without promoting the advance of radical forces that exploit the climate issue for their own purposes poses a challenge for democratic societies, he notes.

According to Welsch, the dilemma posed by an ambitious climate policy could be addressed by introducing political instruments that mitigate the economic and social impact of climate protection measures. As one such potential instrument he proposes a climate fund through which revenues from emissions taxes are distributed to the economically weaker sections of a population.

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Jour

nal

Ecological Economics

DOI

10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108520 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Are national climate change mitigation pledges shaped by citizens' mitigation preferences? Evidence from globally representative data

DEI IS MERITORIOUS

Geological Society of America aames Emily Orzechowski as Director of Geoscience Policy & External Relations

Geological Society of America

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Boulder, Colo., USA: The Geological Society of America (GSA) is delighted to welcome Emily Orzechowski as its new Director of Geoscience Policy & External Relations. With extensive experience in legislative relations, science policy, and geoscience research, Orzechowski will lead GSA’s advocacy efforts to support the geoscience community and its contributions to society.

Orzechowski joins GSA from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), where she managed legislative relations for over 120 member institutions specializing in Earth system science. Previously, she served as an AAAS Congressional Science Fellow in the Office of U.S. Senator Michael F. Bennet and as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Climate Adaptation Science Center. She also represented the United States as a delegate to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, France.

A paleontologist by training, Orzechowski earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where she analyzed environmental changes recorded in the Pleistocene marine terraces of Southern California. She holds a bachelor's degree in Integrated Biology from the College of William and Mary with Interdisciplinary Honors in Geology. Her academic achievements include receiving the Winifred Goldring Award from the Paleontological Society and the Association for Women Geoscientists.

“I am honored to join GSA in its mission to advance geoscience through policy advocacy,” says Orzechowski. “Science-informed policies are essential for addressing critical societal challenges, and I look forward to advancing GSA’s priorities in Washington and beyond.”

“Emily’s expertise in science policy and legislative relations makes her an outstanding addition to GSA,” adds Melanie Brandt, GSA’s CEO and Executive Director. “Having her in this key role will help GSA ensure that knowledge and insights deeply rooted in science lead to the creation of sound public policy.”

Nathan Niemi, Acting President of the GSA Council, expanded on the excitement of Orzechowski joining the GSA staff. “Advocacy for the geosciences in the public domain is more crucial now than ever. GSA is committed to supporting our members who work in the public sector, championing support for geoscience research, and confronting the geoscience-related challenges faced by our communities. Emily’s appointment reinforces GSA’s dedication to bridging geoscience and public policy. By strengthening connections between researchers and decision-makers, she will help ensure that geoscientists play a central role in shaping policies on natural resource management, climate resilience, and public safety.”

To learn more about GSA’s public policy advocacy, please read GSA’s Position Statements and subscribe to the GSA Public Policy Newsletter.

About The Geological Society of America

The Geological Society of America (GSA) is a global professional society with more than 17,000 members across over 100 countries. As a leading voice for the geosciences, GSA advances the understanding of Earth's dynamic processes and fosters collaboration among scientists, educators, and policymakers. GSA publishes Geology, the top-ranked geoscience journal, along with a diverse portfolio of scholarly journals, books, and conference proceedings—several of which rank among Amazon’s top 100 best-selling geology titles.

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