Here’s why pumpkin toadlets are such clumsy jumpers

Tiny inner ear canals may make it hard for the frogs to orient themselves in space

Tiny Brachycephalus frogs from southern Brazil can leap into the air but have trouble landing.
LUIZ F. RIBEIRO



By Meghan Rosen
JUNE 15, 2022 


Some frogs just can’t stick the landing.

After launching into a leap, pumpkin toadlets careen through the air as if flung from a toddler’s fist. They roll, cartwheel or backflip and then plummet to the ground, often belly flopping or crash-landing on their backs.

“I’ve looked at a lot of frogs and these are the weirdest things I’ve ever seen,” says Richard Essner, Jr., a vertebrate zoologist at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Essner and colleagues now propose an explanation for why the tiny frogs are such clumsy jumpers. The animals lack the proper gyroscopic equipment to sense small changes in rotation, the team suggests June 15 in Science Advances.
Brachycephalus pernix frogs have trouble sensing small changes in rotation, which makes landing jumps difficult, a new study suggests. The frogs can roll, cartwheel or backflip through the air, and then hit the ground on their backs or bellies.

When Essner saw videos of Brachycephalus frogs’ awkward aerial maneuvers, he was so shocked that he hopped on a plane to study the animals with his colleagues in Brazil. Small enough to fit on a person’s thumbnail, the frogs are tricky to find in the wild. Scientists listen for the amphibians’ high-pitched, buzzy calls and then scoop leaf litter into a bag, hoping to find a few toadlets.

In the lab, the team used high-speed video to record more than 100 tiny frog jumps. The klutzy tumbles suggested that the toadlets have trouble orienting themselves in space.

Typically, fluid sloshing through bony tubes in the inner ear help vertebrates sense their body’s position. CT scans revealed that the frogs’ tubes are the smallest ever recorded for adult vertebrates. Studies of other tiny animals suggest that the tubes don’t work so well in miniature. It’s difficult for the fluid to flow freely, Essner says. That means the frogs probably can’t sense how they’re twirling through the air, making it tough to prep for landing.

It’s possible that bony back plates offer some species crash protection, but the animals may stay grounded for safety (SN: 4/3/19). As Essner observed, the frogs are “almost always crawling really slowly.”

sciencenews.org

CITATIONS

R. Essner, Jr., et al. Semicircular canal size constrains vestibular function in miniaturized frogs. Science Advances. Published online June 15, 2022. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abn1104.

Butterflies may lose their ‘tails’ like lizards

The spindly parts seem to be a magnet for birds and may break off easily, facilitating escape

The sail swallowtail (Iphiclides podalirius) has tail-like projections on its 

hind wings that may divert attacking birds away from the butterfly’s vital parts.
CAROLINE GAUVIN/MOMENT/GETTY IMAGES PLUS


By Jake Buehler
JUNE 15, 2022 AT 7:00 AM


On some butterfly wings, “tails” may be more than just elegant adornments. They’re survival tools too, a study suggests.

The tails seem to attract the attention of attacking birds, keeping them away from a butterfly’s more vital body parts, researchers report May 25 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The finding could help explain why wing tails have independently evolved multiple times across different moth and butterfly groups.

Evolutionary biologist Ariane Chotard of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris studies the wings of swallowtail butterflies, which make up the hundreds of species in the family Papilionidae. “A lot of these butterflies display tails,” Chotard says. “And we don’t really know why.”

Some butterfly species with false head or eyespot patterns on their wings are known to receive more attacks from predators in those regions. And Chotard and her colleagues wondered if tails were also a target.

So in the summer of 2020, the researchers collected 138 sail swallowtail butterflies (Iphiclides podalirius) from the wild in Ariege, France. Sail swallowtails — found throughout Eurasia — sport two, conspicuous black tails on hind wings with some blue and orange spotting, contrasting greatly with the rest of the insects’ yellow, striped coloration.

Among the collected swallowtails, 65, or 41 percent, had damaged wings, all of which had at least one tail damaged. When all 130 wings in this group of damaged butterflies were counted, more than 82 percent of the wings had damaged tails, suggesting that predators may be targeting the spindly parts

To test that idea, the team kept wild-caught songbirds called great tits (Parus major) in cages. The researchers then showed the birds dummy butterflies made from gluing real swallowtail wings to a fake body made of small pieces of black cardboard, and filmed the birds’ attacks on the faux insects.

Forty-three out of 59 beak strikes, or nearly 73 percent, were on the hind wings. Twenty-three, or 39 percent, of the strikes touched both a tail and colored areas on the upper part of a hind wing simultaneously, more than any other body area on the dummies.
A captive great tit (Parus major) attacks the hind wings and “tails” of a dummy made with real wings from a sail swallowtail butterfly (Iphiclides podalirius). A new study suggests that the tails deflect attacks away from key body parts to brittle extensions that easily tear off, allowing the insect to flee.

Chotard and her colleagues also measured how much force was needed to tear various sections of the swallowtail wing. They found that the vein of the hind wing tail was the most fragile part of the wing and is probably the location most apt to break off in a hungry bird’s beak.

Taken together, the findings suggest that swallowtail tails deflect attacks away from the butterfly’s vulnerable body to brittle extensions that easily tear off, allowing the insect to escape, the researchers say. This may be similar to the strategy some lizards use when sacrificing their detachable tails to hungry predators.

It’s unclear if there are any costs to losing one or two tails, Chotard says. “You survived, you escaped from a predator, but maybe there’s a trade-off and maybe your flight will be [slower].”

Some moth tails can deflect the attacks of echolocating bats (SN: 2/16/15). “Now we have evidence that butterfly tails provide a similar benefit against visual predators,” says evolutionary biologist Juliette Rubin of the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not involved with the study.

Future work determining the survival benefits of the tails could be one next step, Rubin says. “It would be informative to see how live swallowtail butterflies — both with and without tails — fare against bird predators.”

sciencenews.org

CITATIONS

A. Chotard et al. Evidence of attack deflection suggests adaptive evolution of wing tails in butterflies. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Vol. 289, May 25, 2022. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2022.0562.

About Jake Buehler

Ancient ‘smellscapes’ are wafting out of artifacts and old texts

ID’ing odor molecules and brewing Cleopatra’s perfume are part of new research on past scents

The spectrum of smells in ancient societies, and their possible cultural meanings, are being explored by scientists who study odor molecules, old documents and other archaeological finds. Here, a carved relief of an ancient Egyptian queen smelling a lotus flower represents the fragrant world that pharaohs and their families inhabited.
ALAIN GUILLEUX/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

By Bruce Bower

Science News

LONG  READ

Ramses VI faced a smelly challenge when he became Egypt’s king in 1145 B.C. The new pharaoh’s first job was to rid the land of the stench of fish and birds, denizens of the Nile Delta’s fetid swamps.

That, at any rate, was the instruction in a hymn written to Ramses VI upon his ascension to the throne. Some smells, it seems, were considered far worse than others in the land of the pharaohs.

Surviving written accounts indicate that, perhaps unsurprisingly, residents of ancient Egyptian cities encountered a wide array of nice and nasty odors. Depending on the neighborhood, citizens inhaled smells of sweat, disease, cooking meat, incense, trees and flowers. Egypt’s hot weather heightened demand for perfumed oils and ointments that cloaked bodies in pleasant smells.

“The written sources demonstrate that ancient Egyptians lived in a rich olfactory world,” says Egyptologist Dora Goldsmith of Freie Universität Berlin. A full grasp of ancient Egyptian culture requires a comprehensive examination of how pharaohs and their subjects made sense of their lives through smell, she contends. No such study has been conducted.

Archaeologists have traditionally studied visible objects. Investigations have reconstructed what ancient buildings looked like based on excavated remains and determined how people lived by analyzing their tools, personal ornaments and other tangible finds.

Rare projects have re-created what people may have heard thousands of years ago at sites such as Stonehenge (SN: 8/31/20). Piecing together, much less re-creating, the olfactory landscapes, or smellscapes, of long-ago places has attracted even less scholarly curiosity. Ancient cities in Egypt and elsewhere have been presented as “colorful and monumental, but odorless and sterile,” Goldsmith says.

Changes are in the air, though. Some archaeologists are sniffing out odor molecules from artifacts found at dig sites and held in museums. Others are poring over ancient texts for references to perfume recipes, and have even cooked up a scent much like one presumably favored by Cleopatra. In studying and reviving scents of the past, these researchers aim to understand how ancient people experienced, and interpreted, their worlds through smell.

Molecular odors

A growing array of biomolecular techniques is enabling the identification of molecules from ancient aromatic substances preserved in cooking pots and other containers, in debris from city garbage pits, in tartar caked on human teeth and even in mummified remains.

Take the humble incense burner, for instance. Finding an ancient incense burner indicates only that a substance of some kind was burned. Unraveling the molecular makeup of residue clinging to such a find “can determine what exactly was burned and reconstruct whether it was the scent of frankincense, myrrh, scented woods or blends of different aromatics,” says archaeologist Barbara Huber.

That sort of detective work is exactly what Huber, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and her colleagues did in research on the walled oasis settlement of Tayma in what’s now Saudi Arabia.

Researchers generally assume that Tayma was a pit stop on an ancient network of trade routes, known as the Incense Route, that carried frankincense and myrrh from southern Arabia to Mediterranean destinations around 2,300 to 1,900 years ago. Frankincense and myrrh are both spicy-smelling resins extracted from shrubs and trees that grow on the Arabian Peninsula and in northeastern Africa and India. But Tayma was more than just a refueling oasis for trade caravans.

The desert outpost’s residents purchased aromatic plants for their own uses during much of the settlement’s history, a team led by Huber found. Chemical and molecular analyses of charred resins identified frankincense in cube-shaped incense burners previously unearthed in Tayma’s residential quarter, myrrh in cone-shaped incense burners that had been placed in graves outside the town wall, and an aromatic substance from Mediterranean mastic trees in small goblets used as incense burners in a large public building.

Fragrances of various kinds that must have had special meanings permeated a range of daily activities at ancient Tayma, Huber’s group reported in 2018 in Munich at the 11th International Conference on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East.

In a more recent study, published March 28 in Nature Human Behavior, Huber and her colleagues outlined ways to detect chemical and genetic traces of ancient scents.

Incense burners found at an Arabian Peninsula settlement called Tayma, represented by this cone-shaped artifact, contain clues to a range of fragrances used in daily activities roughly 2,000 years ago.A.D.                 RIDDLE/BIBLEPLACES.COM

Other researchers have gone searching for molecular scent clues in previously excavated pottery. Analytical chemist Jacopo La Nasa of the University of Pisa in Italy and his colleagues used a portable version of a mass spectrometer to study 46 vessels, jars, cups and lumps of organic material.

These artifacts were found more than a century ago in the underground tomb of Kha and his wife Merit, prominent nonroyals who lived during Egypt’s 18th dynasty from about 1450 B.C. to 1400 B.C. The spectrometer can detect the signature chemical makeup of invisible gases emitted during the decay of different fragrant plants and other substances that had been placed inside vessels.

Analyses of residue from inside seven open vessels and of one lump of unidentified organic material detected oil or fat, beeswax or both, the scientists report in the May Journal of Archaeological Science. One open vessel yielded possible chemical markers of dried fish and of a possible aromatic resin that could not be specified. The remaining containers were sealed and had to stay that way due to museum policy. Measurements taken in the necks of those vessels also picked up signs of oils or fats and beeswax in some cases. Evidence of a barley flour appeared in one vessel’s neck.

Museum-based studies such as La Nasa’s have great potential to unlock ancient scents. But that’s true only if researchers can open sealed vessels and, with a bit of luck, find enough surviving chemical components of whatever was inside to identify the substance, Goldsmith says.

Luck did not favor La Nasa’s group, she says. “Their analyses did not detect any [specific] scents.”

Oils, fats and beeswax in the seven open vessels could only have constituted neutral-smelling base ingredients for ancient Egyptian perfumes and ointments, Goldsmith says. Starting with mixtures of those substances, Egyptian perfume makers added a host of fragrant ingredients that included myrrh, resin and bark from styrax and pine trees, juniper berries, frankincense and nut grass. The heating of these concoctions produced strongly scented ointments.

Re-creating Cleopatra’s perfume

A tradition of fragrant remedies and perfumes began as the first Egyptian royal dynasties assumed power around 5,100 years ago, Goldsmith’s research suggests. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic and cursive documents describe recipes for several perfumes. But precise ingredients and preparation methods remain unknown.

That didn’t stop Goldsmith and historian of Greco-Roman philosophy and science Sean Coughlin of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague from trying to re-create a celebrated Egyptian fragrance known as the Mendesian perfume. Cleopatra, a perfume devotee during her reign as queen from 51 B.C. to 30 B.C., may have doused herself with this scented potion. The perfume took its name from the city where it was made, Mendes.

Excavations conducted since 2009 at Thmouis, a city founded as an extension of Mendes, have uncovered the roughly 2,300-year-old remains of what was probably a fragrance factory, including kilns and clay perfume containers (SN: 11/27/19). Archaeologist Robert Littman of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and anthropological archaeologist Jay Silverstein of the University of Tyumen in Russia, who direct the Thmouis dig, asked Goldsmith and Coughlin to try to crack the Mendesian perfume code by consulting ancient writings.

After experimenting with ingredients that included desert date oil, myrrh, cinnamon and pine resin, Goldsmith and Coughlin produced a scent that they suspect approximates what Cleopatra probably wore. It’s a strong but pleasant, long-lasting blend of spiciness and sweetness, they say.

Ingredients of a re-creation of an ancient fragrance called the Mendesian perfume consist of pine resin, cinnamon cassia, true cinnamon, myrrh and moringa oil (shown from left to right). Cleopatra herself may have worn the ancient scent.

D. GOLDSMITH AND S. COUGHLIN

A description of the Thmouis discoveries and efforts to revive the Mendesian scent — dubbed Eau de Cleopatra by the researchers — appeared in the Sept. 2021 Near Eastern Archaeology.

Goldsmith has re-created several more ancient Egyptian perfumes from written recipes for fragrances that were used in everyday life, for temple rituals and in the mummification process.

Ancient smellscapes

Odor molecules unearthed in archaeological digs and reconstituted perfumes from the past, however, offer only a partial view of the scents of thousands of years ago. To get a more complete picture of an ancient city’s or town’s range of smells — its smellscape — some archaeologists are combing ancient written texts for references to smell.

That’s what Goldsmith did to come up with what she thinks is a smellscape typical of ancient Egyptian cities. Here’s what a “smellwalk” through one of these cities would entail, she says.

In the royal palace, for instance, the perfumed smell of rulers and their family members would have overpowered that of court officials and servants. That would perhaps have denoted special ties to the gods among those in charge, Goldsmith wrote in a chapter of The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East, published in September of 2021

.

Smells of aromatic substances ignited in incense burners (such as the one held here by the pharaoh Ramses II in a temple wall carving at the Karnak Temple Complex near Luxor, Egypt) held deep meaning for ancient Egyptians, researchers say.

PRISMA ARCHIVO/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

In temples, priests anointed images of gods with what was called the 10 sacred oils. Though their ingredients are mostly unknown, each substance apparently had its own pleasing scent and ritual function. Temples mixed smells of perfumes, flowers and incense with roasted meat. Written sources describe the smell of fatty meat being grilled as especially pleasing and a sign of peace as well as authority over enemies.

In other parts of an ancient Egyptian city, Goldsmith says, scribal students lived in a special building where they learned Egyptian script. Achieving such knowledge required total devotion and the avoidance of perfume or other pleasant scents. One ancient source described aspiring scribes as “stinking bulls.” That name speaks, and reeks, for itself.

Meanwhile, in workshops, sandal-makers mixing tan to soften hides and smiths making metal weapons at the mouths of furnaces probably developed their own distinctive, foul smells, Goldsmith says.

Stinky odors get far fewer mentions than sweet aromas in many of the written accounts from ancient Egypt that Goldsmith reviewed. Goats and other domestic animals, butchered carcasses, open latrines and garbage in the streets, for example, get no mention in these surviving texts.

An awareness that such texts may represent only an elite perspective — and thus not reveal the entire smellscape of the time or how it was perceived by everyday folks — is crucial when compiling the scents of ancient history, Goldsmith says.

Cultured noses

Once researchers come up with a reasonable reconstruction of an ancient city’s smellscape, the challenge shifts to figuring out how the ancients interpreted those smells.

Scent is a powerful part of the human experience. Today, scientists know that smells, which humans might discriminate surprisingly well, can instantly trigger memories of past experiences (SN: 3/20/14). And social and ritual meanings also get attached to specific odors — there’s nothing like the smell of freshly mown grass and grilled hot dogs to evoke memories of summer days at the ballpark.

People in modern settings probably perceive the same smells as nice or nasty as folks in ancient Egypt or other past societies did, says psychologist Asifa Majid of the University of Oxford. In line with that possibility, members of nine non-Western cultures, including hunter-gatherers in Thailand and farming villagers in highland Ecuador, closely agreed with Western city dwellers when ranking the pleasantness of 10 odors, Majid and her colleagues report April 4 in Current Biology.

Smells of vanilla, citrus and floral sweetness — dispensed by pen-sized devices — got high marks. Odors of rancid oiliness and a fermented scent like that of ripe cheese or human sweat evoked frequent “yech” responses.

A collective “yech” in response to the Nile Delta’s moist, stinky emissions may have inspired the hymn that instructed Ramses VI to rid the land of its swampy fish and fowl smell. But Goldsmith argues that the hymn’s meaning is deeper and hinges on what ancient Egyptians saw as a conflict between sweet and evil smells.

In a 2019 review of texts written during the reigns of various ancient Egyptian kings, Goldsmith was struck by frequent references to this odiferous opposition. She concluded that ancient Egyptians’ largely unexplored views about what exemplified good and bad smells could provide insights into their world view. Researchers have long noted that concepts known as isfet and ma’at helped ancient Egyptians determine what was good or bad in the world. Isfet referred to a natural state of chaos and evil. Ma’at denoted a world of order and justice.

Signature odors were associated with isfet and ma’at, Goldsmith proposed in a chapter in Sounding Sensory Profiles in the Ancient Near East. In Nile societies, the smelly fish and birds best represented isfet’s nasal assault. Fish, in particular, signified not only stench but also the danger of unfamiliar places outside the pharaoh’s command, she concludes. Meanwhile, the ancient documents equated scented ointments and perfumes with the ma’at of civilized, pharaoh-ruled cities, she says.

Thus, an Egyptian pharaoh’s first duty was to erase the social and physical stink of isfet and institute the sweet smell of ma’at, Goldsmith contends. In his welcoming hymn, Ramses VI got a friendly reminder to make Egypt politically strong and olfactorily fresh.

Explicit beliefs connecting isfet with evil smells and ma’at with sweet smells throughout ancient Egyptian history haven’t yet been established but deserve closer scrutiny, says UCLA Egyptologist Robyn Price.

Price thinks that, rather than being fixed, values that were applied to scents fluctuated over time. For instance, some ancient texts describe the “marsh,” where fish and fowl flourished, as a place of divine creation, she says. And documents from southern Egypt often spoke negatively about northern Egyptians, perhaps influencing claims that northern marshes stunk of isfet during periods when the two regions were under separate rule.

So, even if the ancients tagged the same odors as pleasurable or offensive as people do today, culture and context probably profoundly shaped responses to those smells.

Working-class Romans living in Pompeii around 2,000 years ago — before Mount Vesuvius’ catastrophic eruption in A.D. 79 — provide one example. Archaeological evidence and written sources indicate that patrons of small taverns throughout the city were bombarded with strong smells, says archaeologist Erica Rowan of Royal Holloway, University of London. Diners standing or sitting in small rooms and at outdoor counters whiffed smoky, greasy food being cooked, body odors of other customers who had been toiling all day and pungent aromas wafting out of nearby latrines.

The smells and noises that filled Pompeii’s taverns provided a familiar and comforting experience for everyday Romans, who made these establishments successful, Rowan suspects. Excavations have uncovered 158 of these informal eating and drinking spots throughout Pompeii.

Pompeii residents eating at small taverns such as this one around 2,000 years ago may have whiffed a range of nice and nasty odors that the residents experienced as familiar and comforting.

AP PHOTO/GREGORIO BORGIA

Roman cities generally smelled of human waste, decaying animal carcasses, garbage, smoke, incense, cooked meat and boiled cabbage, Classical historian Neville Morley of the University of Exeter in England wrote in 2014 in a chapter of Smell and the Ancient Senses. That potent mix “must have been the smell of home to its inhabitants and perhaps even the smell of civilization,” he concluded.

Ramses VI undoubtedly regarded the perfumed world of his palace as the epitome of civilized life. But at the end of a long day, Egyptian sandal-makers and smiths, like Pompeii’s working stiffs, may well have smelled home as the air of city streets filled their nostrils.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

Editor's Note:

This story was updated May 4, 2022, to note Asifa Majid's new affiliation with the University of Oxford.

A version of this article appears in the June 18, 2022 issue of Science News.

CITATIONS

D. Goldsmith. Smellscapes in ancient Egypt. In K. Neumann and A. Thomason, eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East. New York, September 2021.

J. La Nasa et al. Archaeology of the invisible: The scent of Kha and Merit. Journal of Archaeological Science. Vol. 141, May 2022. doi: 10.1016/j.jas.2022.105577.

A. Arshamian et al. The perception of odor pleasantness is shared across cultures. Current Biology. Published April 4, 2022. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.02.062.

B. Huber et al. How to use modern science to reconstruct ancient scents. Nature Human Behavior. Published March 28, 2022. doi: 10.1038/s41562-022-01325-7.

R.J. Littman et al. Eau de Cleopatra: Mendesian perfume and Tell Timai. Near Eastern Archaeology. Vol. 84, September 2021, p. 216. doi: 10.1086/715345.

E. Rowan. The sensory experiences of food consumption. In R. Skeates and J. Day, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Sensory Archaeology. New York, November 2019.

D. Goldsmith. Fish, fowl and stench in ancient Egypt. In A. Schellenberg and T. Krüger, eds., Sounding Sensory Profiles in the Ancient Near East. SBL Press, 2019.

B. Huber et al. An archaeology of odors: Chemical evidence of ancient aromatics at the oasis of Tayma, NW Arabia. 11th International Conference on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Munich, April 3–7, 2018.

N. Morley. Urban smells and Roman noses. In M. Bradley, ed., Smell and the Ancient Senses. New York, December 2014.

Lucy Cooke’s new book ‘Bitch’ busts myths about female animals

Sexism in biology has left females misunderstood

Female ring-tailed lemurs provide most territorial defense in their social groups, challenging stereotypes about male and female roles.
RAIMUND LINKE/THE IMAGE BANK/GETTY IMAGES PLUS



By Erika Engelhaupt
JUNE 14, 2022 AT 9:00 AM


Bitch
Lucy Cooke
Basic Books, $30

To Charles Darwin, nature had a certain order. And in that order, males always came out on top. They were the leaders, the innovators, the wooers and the doers.

“The males of almost all animals have stronger passions than the females,” Darwin wrote in 1871. “The female, on the other hand, with the rarest of exceptions, is less eager.” The founder of evolutionary theory posited that throughout the animal kingdom, males are active, females are passive, and that’s pretty much that. Females, in sum, are boring.

That’s poppycock, Lucy Cooke writes in her latest book, Bitch. This blinkered view of nature as a man’s world was conceived and promulgated by Victorian men who imposed their values and world view on animals, she says. Cooke, a documentary filmmaker and the author of The Truth About Animals and two children’s books (SN: 4/14/18, p. 26), has traveled the world and met scientists who are exposing the truth about the sexes. She takes readers on a wild ride as she observes the ridiculous mating rituals of sage grouse, searches for orca poop (to monitor sex hormones) and watches female lemurs boss around males.

Through such adventures, Cooke learns that females are anything but boring. “Female animals are just as promiscuous, competitive, aggressive, dominant and dynamic as males,” she writes.

That may not sound radical to today’s feminists, but in the field of evolutionary biology, such a pronouncement has long bordered on the heretical. Generations of biologists have focused on male behavior and physiology, on the assumption that females are little more than baby-making machines to be won over by the strongest, showiest males.

Historically, when females did something potentially interesting, like exercise leadership over their social groups, many scientists scratched their heads and chalked it up as an aberration. When behavior didn’t fit the mold, like female-dominant spotted hyenas or peaceable male pinyon jays, it was either ignored or shoehorned into existing theory. For instance, ornithologists posited that aggressive female pinyon jays must suffer “the avian equivalent of PMS,” Cooke writes. The reality is that pinyon jays have a complex social hierarchy that doesn’t include the “alpha male” that scientists had expected. In recent years, scientists (many, but not all of them, female themselves) have begun to challenge Darwinian dogma about the sexes and submit it to rigorous testing.

Cooke draws on this recent science to systematically take down myths about females. She begins by asking what biological sex actually is — what makes a male a male, and a female a female — and shows that it’s far less black-and-white than we’ve been led to believe. Take the case of the European mole, in which the female sports gonads called ovotestes that produce eggs during the short breeding season, and testosterone the rest of the time. As a result, the female’s genitalia look just like the male’s, with a penislike clitoris and a vagina that vanishes after the breeding season.

The mole is just one example of sexual ambiguity among many that Cooke outlines. As the science of recent decades has revealed, even the genetics of sex is far more complicated than having either XX or XY chromosomes (which themselves are just one of many genetic systems for determining sex across the animal kingdom). In humans, males and females have the same set of about 60 sex-determining genes, which can create either testes or ovaries. Because of shared biology, the sexes are far more alike than they are different, and they exist in more of a continuum of bodies and behaviors than many people may be comfortable with.

Cooke also takes on many other ways scientists have misread sexual dynamics over the years, such as the myth that males benefit evolutionarily from promiscuity and females from monogamy. She addresses misconceptions about sexual cannibalism and animal genitals, complete with silicone replicas of animal vaginas. And she challenges ideas about the maternal instinct. As Cooke points out, males and females share the same neural circuitry, leading to fascinating experiments that stimulate certain nerve cells to flip male mice from infanticidal to doting dads.

In short, Cooke demolishes much of what you probably learned about the sexes in biology class. This may be disconcerting, even confronting for those who feel comfortable in the warm embrace of Darwinian order. But it’s also exciting, and fascinating, and very well might change the way you see the world.

Buy Bitch from Bookshop.org. Science News is a Bookshop.org affiliate and will earn a commission on purchases made from links in this article.

About Erika Engelhaupt
Erika Engelhaupt is a freelance science writer and editor based in Knoxville, Tenn.

Caribou gut parasites indirectly create a greener tundra
Infected herbivores eat less, allowing plants to flourish

A caribou on Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula browses on some willows. 

JEFF KERBY

By Jake Buehler

Gut parasites in large plant eaters like caribou thrive out of sight and somewhat out of mind. But these tiny tummy tenants can have big impacts on the landscape that their hosts travel through.

Digestive tract parasites in caribou can reduce the amount that their hosts eat, allowing for more plant growth in the tundra where the animals live, researchers report in the May 17 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The finding reveals that even nonlethal infections can have reverberating effects through ecosystems.

Interactions between species have long been known to ripple through ecosystems, indirectly impacting other parts of the food web. When predators eat herbivores, for example, a reduction in plant-eating mouths leads to changes in the plant community. This is how sea otters, for example, can encourage kelp growth by feeding on herbivorous urchins (SN: 3/29/21).

“Anytime you have a change in species interactions that changes what the animals are doing on the landscape, it can influence their impact on the ecosystem,” says Amanda Koltz, an ecologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

When parasites and pathogens kill their hosts, it can have a similar effect to predators on ecosystems. A prime example is the rinderpest virus, which in the late 19th century devastated populations of ruminants — buffalo, antelope, cattle — in sub-Saharan Africa. Once wildebeest populations in East Africa were spared further infection following the vaccination of cattle and the eradication of the virus, their exploding numbers trimmed the grass back in the Serengeti and led to other landscape changes.

But unlike rinderpest, most infections aren’t lethal. Nonlethal parasite infections are pervasive in ruminants — plant eaters that play key roles in shaping vegetation on land. Koltz and her team wondered if changes to a ruminant’s overall health or behavior from a chronic parasitic infection could also induce changes in the surrounding plant community.

Parasites like this brown stomach worm (Teladorsagia circumcincta), shown in an SEM image, are common residents of the guts of ruminants such as sheep, cattle and deer.

DENNIS KUNKEL MICROSCOPY/SCIENCE SOURCE

The researchers looked to caribou (Rangifer tarandus). Using data from published studies, Koltz and her team developed a series of mathematical simulations to test how caribou survival, reproduction and feeding rate could be influenced by stomach worm (Ostertagia spp.) infections.

The scientists then calculated how these effects could alter the total mass of and population changes in the caribou, parasites and plants. The simulations predict that not only could lethal infections trigger a cascade leading to more plant mass, but also nonlethal infections had just as large an effect. Sickened caribou that ate less or experienced a drop in reproduction rate led to an increase in plant mass when compared with a scenario with no parasites.

The team also analyzed data from 59 studies on 18 species of ruminants and their parasites, gathering information on how the parasites impact host feeding rates and body mass. The analysis found that chronic parasitic infections generally cause many types of herbivores to eat less, also reducing their body mass and fat reserves.

Indirect ecological ramifications from parasitic infections could be common in ruminants all over the world, the researchers conclude.

The study “highlights that there are widespread interactions that we’re not considering in ecosystem contexts quite yet, but we should be,” Koltz says.

Globally, parasites face an uncertain future with fast environmental changes — like climate change and habitat loss from changes in land use — altering relationships with their hosts, potentially leading to many parasite extinctions. “How such changes in host-parasite interactions might disrupt the structure and functioning of ecosystems is a topic that we should be thinking about,” Koltz says.

The findings also are “going to change how we think about what controls ecosystems,” says Oswald Schmitz, a population ecologist at Yale University who was not involved in the research. “Maybe it isn’t predators that are necessarily controlling the ecosystem, maybe the parasites are more important,” he says. “And so, what we really need to do is more research that disentangles [this].”

Scientists are rapidly gaining a better understanding of parasites’ ubiquity and abundance, says Joshua Grinath, an ecologist at Idaho State University in Pocatello. “Now we are challenged with understanding the roles of parasites within ecological communities and ecosystems.”

sciencenews.org

CITATIONS

A.M. Koltz et al. Sublethal effects of parasitism on ruminants can have cascading consequences for ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 119, May 17, 2022, e2117381119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2117381119.

R.M. Holdo et al. A disease-mediated trophic cascade in the Serengeti and its implications for ecosystem C. PLOS Biology. Published September 29, 2009. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000210.

C.J. Carlson et al. Parasite biodiversity faces extinction and redistribution in a changing climate. Science Advances. Vol. 3., September 6, 2017. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1602422.

About Jake Buehler

KINETOSCOPE

Prehistoric people may have used light from fires to create dynamic art

When brought near flickering flames, stone engravings of animals seem to move

Replicas of stones featuring animal engravings, which were excavated in southern France, are shown positioned around a fire. Researchers think prehistoric people would have placed them this way so flickering flames would create the illusion of moving images.        A. NEEDHAM ET AL/PLOS ONE 2022 (CC-BY 4.0)

By Allison Gasparini

Prehistoric people may have used firelight to create the illusion of movement in their art.

An analysis of 50 engraved stones excavated in France suggests that when the stones were placed near a fire, the flickering light made the engraved animals seem to move, researchers report April 20 in PLOS ONE.

These stones, or “plaquettes,” were found in the 1860s in a rock-shelter called Montastruc, and are engraved with animals such as horses, ibex and deer. The site was used by Magdalenian people, hunter-gatherers who inhabited the area between 23,000 and 14,000 years ago.

The researchers analyzed heat damage on the stones, which was indicative of them being directly exposed to high temperatures for a prolonged period, and created 3-D models of the plaquettes. Those models were imported to a virtual reality software where they were placed next to a virtual hearth so that the areas of heat damage were closest to the flames, mimicking how the stones may have been placed in real life. The researchers then observed the visual effects of the virtual reality light.

It was surprising to see how dynamic the art was and “how changed your experience of the art was by a simple thing, just putting it close to a fire,” says Andy Needham, an archaeologist at the University of York in England. The work suggests that the artists purposely engraved along the contours of the rock to influence viewers to see meaningful movement through the random pattern of firelight, he says.

The finding adds to archaeologists’ understandings of the relationship between early people’s artwork and fire. Another recent study found that Stone Age humans created “hidden” art in dark caves which could be illuminated and made visible only with the help of the right lighting (SN: 7/6/21).

CITATIONS
A. Needham et al. Art by firelight? Using experimental and digital techniques to explore Magdalenian engraved plaquette use at Montastruc (France). PLOS ONE. Published online April 20, 2022. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266146.

sciencenews.org

Ancient penguin bones reveal unprecedented shrinkage in key Antarctic glaciers

Thwaites Glacier is losing ice more quickly than at any other time in the last 5,500 years

Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, shown in February of 2020 shedding ice into Pine Island Bay, may be retreating at an unprecedented rate.       NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY, USGS

By Douglas Fox

sciencenews.org
JUNE 9, 2022 

Antarctica’s Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers are losing ice more quickly than they have at any time in the last few thousand years, ancient penguin bones and limpet shells suggest.

Scientists are worried that the glaciers, two of Antarctica’s fastest-shrinking ones, are in the process of unstable, runaway retreat. By reconstructing the history of the glaciers using the old bones and shells, researchers wanted to find out whether these glaciers have ever been smaller than they are today.

“If the ice has been smaller in the past, and did readvance, that shows that we’re not necessarily in runaway retreat” right now, says glacial geologist Brenda Hall of the University of Maine in Orono. The new result, described June 9 in Nature Geoscience, “doesn’t give us any comfort,” Hall says. “We can’t refute the hypothesis of a runaway retreat.”

Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers sit in a broad ocean basin shaped like a bowl, deepening toward the middle. This makes the ice vulnerable to warm currents of dense, salty water that hug the ocean floor (SN: 4/9/21). Scientists have speculated that as the glaciers retreat farther inland, they could tip into an irreversible collapse (SN: 12/13/21). That collapse could play out over centuries and raise the sea level by roughly a meter.

Researchers dated ancient shorelines (seen here as the series of small ridges in the rocky terrain between the foreground boulders and background snow) on islands roughly 100 kilometers from Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers in Antarctica to help figure out if the glaciers are in the process of unstable, runaway retreat.      JAMES KIRKHAM

To reconstruct how the glaciers have changed over thousands of years, the researchers turned to old penguin bones and shells, collected by Scott Braddock, a glacial geologist in Hall’s lab, during a research cruise in 2019 on the U.S. icebreaker Nathaniel B. Palmer.

One afternoon, Braddock clambered from a bobbing inflatable boat onto the barren shores of Lindsey 1 — one of a dozen or more rocky islands that sit roughly 100 kilometers from where Pine Island Glacier terminates in the ocean. As he climbed the slope, his boots slipped over rocks covered in penguin guano and dotted with dingy white feathers. Then, he came upon a series of ridges — rocks and pebbles that were piled up by waves during storms thousands of years before — that marked ancient shorelines.

Twelve thousand years ago, just as the last ice age was ending, this island would have been entirely submerged in the ocean. But as nearby glaciers shed billions of metric tons of ice, the removal of that weight allowed Earth’s crust to spring up like a bed mattress — pushing Lindsey 1 and other nearby islands out of the water, a few millimeters per year.

As Lindsey 1 rose, a series of shorelines formed on the edges of the island — and then were lifted, one after another, out of reach of the waves. By measuring the ages and heights of those stranded shorelines, the researchers could tell how quickly the island had risen. Because the rate of uplift is determined by the amount of ice being lost from nearby glaciers, this would reveal how quickly Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers had retreated — and whether they had gotten smaller than they are today and then readvanced.

Braddock dug into the pebbly ridges, collecting ancient cone-shaped limpet shells and marble-sized fragments of penguin bones deposited when the shorelines formed. Back in Maine, he and his colleagues radiocarbon dated those objects to estimate the ages of the shorelines. Ultimately, the researchers dated nearly two dozen shorelines, spread across several islands in the region.

These dates showed that the oldest and highest beach formed 5,500 years ago. Since that time, up until the last few decades, the islands have risen at a steady rate of about 3.5 millimeters per year. This is far slower than the 20 to 40 millimeters per year that the land around Pine Island and Thwaites is currently rising, suggesting that the rate of ice loss from nearby glaciers has skyrocketed due to the onset of rapid human-caused warming, after thousands of years of relative stability.

“We’re going into unknown territory,” Braddock says. “We don’t have an analog to compare what’s going on today with what happened in the past.”

Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, sees the newly dated shorelines as “an important piece of information.” But he cautions against overinterpreting the results. While these islands are 100 kilometers from Pine Island and Thwaites, they are less than 50 kilometers from several smaller glaciers — and changes in these closer glaciers might have obscured whatever was happening at Pine Island and Thwaites long ago. He suspects that Pine Island and Thwaites could still have retreated and then readvanced a few dozen kilometers: “I don’t think this study settles it.”

CITATIONS

S. Braddock et al. Relative sea-level data preclude major late Holocene ice-mass change in Pine Island Bay. Nature Geoscience. Published online June 9, 2022. doi: 10.1038/s41561-022-00961-y.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/06/polar-scientist-explains-peril-of.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2022/06/present-antarctic-deglaciation-may-be.html

FUND HEALTHCARE NOT COPS
How having health care workers handle nonviolent police calls may impact crime

The Denver pilot program in the study is one of many similar ones rolled out in recent years

In June 2020, Denver launched a pilot program to send trained health professionals (shown) rather than police officers in response to 911 calls for help involving nonviolent offenses, such as trespassing or disorderly conduct.         DENVER POLICE DEPARTMENT

By Sujata Gupta
JUNE 8, 2022 

For the last two years, a person acting erratically in downtown Denver has likely first encountered unarmed health care workers rather than police. That shift stems from the rollout of a program known as Support Team Assisted Response, or STAR, which sends a mental health clinician and paramedic to respond to certain 911 calls about nonviolent behavior.

The program, and others like it, aim to defuse the tensions that can arise when police officers confront civilians in distress. Critics of these experimental programs have suggested that such reduced police involvement could allow crime to flourish. 

Now, researchers have found that during its pilot phase, the STAR program did not appear to lead to more violent crime. And reports of minor crimes substantially decreased, the researchers conclude June 8 in Science Advances.

Much of that reduction occurred because the health responders do not issue citations or make arrests (SN: 12/18/21). But even that reduction in reported crime is beneficial, says economist Thomas Dee of Stanford University. “That person is getting health care instead of being arrested.”

Following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer and the subsequent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020, cities throughout the country have been rolling out programs like STAR. “We cannot police our way out of every social problem,” says Temitope Oriola, a sociologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. But so far there have been few studies of these programs’ effects on crime, let alone on the reduction of violence between police and the public (SN: 7/9/20).

Dee and Jayme Pyne, a sociologist also at Stanford, looked at the STAR program’s impact on crime reports. The duo investigated the program’s pilot phase, which ran from June to November 2020 and encompassed eight of the city’s 36 police precincts. Police officers and 911 operators in those eight precincts redirected calls for minor and non-dangerous complaints to STAR providers. These calls included concerns about trespassing, indecent exposure, intoxication and similar low-level offenses. During the six-month pilot, STAR providers responded to 748 calls, averaging roughly six incidents per eight-hour shift.

Dee and Pyne analyzed criminal offenses in all 36 precincts from December 2019 to November 2020. They then compared the change in crime rates in the eight precincts receiving STAR services with the change in crime rates in the other 28 precincts. The rate of violent crime remained unchanged across the board, including in the precincts where the STAR program was active, the researchers found. But there was a 34 percent drop in reports of minor offenses in the STAR precincts, from an average of about 84 offenses per month in each district to an average of about 56 citations.

The data also suggest that the actual level of minor crimes and complaints dropped too — that is, the drop wasn’t just due to a lack of reporting, the researchers say. Prior to the pilot, minor offenses in the eight precincts receiving STAR services resulted in an average of 1.4 citations per incident. So having health care workers rather than police respond to 748 such calls should generate roughly 1,000 fewer citations, the authors calculate. Instead, citations dropped by almost 1,400. Providing people in crisis with access to health services may be preventing them from reoffending, Dee says.

Research into these sorts of programs is crucial, says Michael Vermeer, a justice policy researcher with the RAND Corporation, a public policy research organization headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif. But he cautions against drawing firm conclusions from a single study launched at the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, which dramatically changed crime rates and patterns across the country. “They just got confounded by the pandemic,” Vermeer says.

Dee agrees that he and other researchers now need to replicate this study across more cities, and also scale up in Denver. The city has since expanded the STAR program beyond the initial pilot.

Even if researchers eventually find that STAR and similar programs don’t budge crime rates much, that doesn’t mean that the programs are unsuccessful, says sociologist Brenden Beck of the University of Colorado Denver. He points to the potential to save taxpayer dollars. Dee and Pyne estimate that a single offense processed through STAR costs about $150, compared with the roughly $600 it costs to process one through the criminal justice system.

What’s more, helping people having nonviolent mental health crises get help and stay out of jail lets these individuals hold onto their jobs and stay present in their family members’ lives, Beck says. “I would hope we as a research community move on to study the benefit of these programs not just in terms of crime but also in terms of human welfare.”

CITATIONS

T. Dee and J. Pyne. A community response approach to mental health and substance abuse crises reduced crime. Science Advances. Vol. 8, June 8, 2022. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abm2106.

sciencenews.org

COSBY A RAPIST AND THAT IS THAT
Civil jury finds Bill Cosby sexually abused teenager in 1975


SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) — Jurors at a civil trial found Tuesday that Bill Cosby sexually abused a 16-year-old girl at the Playboy Mansion in 1975.

The Los Angeles County jury delivered the verdict in favor of Judy Huth, who is now 64, and awarded her $500,000.

“It’s been torture,” Huth said of the seven-year legal fight. “To be ripped apart, you know, thrown under the bus and backed over. This, to me, is such a big victory.”

Jurors found that Cosby intentionally caused harmful sexual contact with Huth, that he reasonably believed she was under 18, and that his conduct was driven by unnatural or abnormal sexual interest in a minor.

The jurors’ decision is a major legal defeat for the 84-year-old entertainer once hailed as America’s dad. It comes nearly a year after his Pennsylvania criminal conviction for sexual assault was thrown out and he was freed from prison. Huth’s lawsuit was one of the last remaining legal claims against him after his insurer settled many others against his will.

Cosby did not attend the trial or testify in person, but short clips from 2015 video deposition were played for jurors, in which he denied any sexual contact with Huth. He continues to deny the allegation through his attorney and publicist.

Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt said they would appeal and he claimed they had won because Huth didn’t win punitive damages.

Jurors had already reached conclusions on nearly every question on their verdict form, including whether Cosby abused Huth and whether she deserved damages, after two days of deliberations on Friday. But the jury foreperson could not serve further because of a personal commitment, and the panel had to start deliberating from scratch with an alternate juror on Monday.

Cosby’s attorneys agreed that Cosby met Huth and her high school friend on a Southern California film set in April of 1975, then took them to the Playboy Mansion a few days later.

Huth’s friend Donna Samuelson, a key witness, took photos at the mansion of Huth and Cosby, which loomed large at the trial.

Huth testified that in a bedroom adjacent to a game room where the three had been hanging out, Cosby attempted to put his hand down her pants, then exposed himself and forced her to perform a sex act.

Huth filed her lawsuit in 2014, saying that her son turning 15 — the age she initially remembered being when she went to the mansion — and a wave of other women accusing Cosby of similar acts brought fresh trauma over what she had been through as a teenager.

Huth’s attorney Nathan Goldberg told the jury of nine women and three men during closing arguments Wednesday that “my client deserves to have Mr. Cosby held accountable for what he did.”

“Each of you knows in your heart that Mr. Cosby sexually assaulted Miss Huth,” Goldberg said.

A majority of jurors apparently agreed, giving Huth a victory in a suit that took eight years and overcame many hurdles just to get to trial.

During their testimony, Cosby attorney Jennifer Bonjean consistently challenged Huth and Samuelson over errors in detail in their stories, and a similarity in the accounts that the lawyer said represented coordination between the two women.

This included the women saying in pre-trial depositions and police interviews that Samuelson had played Donkey Kong that day, a game not released until six years later.

Bonjean made much of this, in what both sides came to call the “Donkey Kong defense.”

Goldberg asked jurors to look past the small errors in detail that he said were inevitable in stories that were 45 years old, and focus on the major issues behind the allegations. He pointed out to jurors that Samuelson said “games like Donkey Kong” when she first mentioned it in her deposition.

The Cosby lawyer began her closing arguments by saying, “It’s on like Donkey Kong,” and finished by declaring, “game over.”

Huth’s attorney reacted with outrage during his rebuttal.

“This is about justice!” he shouted, pounding on the podium. “We don’t need game over! We need justice!”

The Associated Press does not normally name people who say they have been sexually abused, unless they come forward publicly, as Huth has.

___

AP Entertainment Writer Andrew Dalton contributed to this report.

Brian Melley, The Associated Press

FASCISTS HAVE NO RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH

Poilievre promises to protect freedom of speech on campus, appoint a 'Free Speech Guardian'

Catherine Lévesque - National Post

The idea of withholding federal funds from universities in order to protect free speech on campus is not new.

Conservative leadership hopeful Pierre Poilievre is threatening to remove direct federal research and other grants from Canadian universities if they do not commit to protect academic freedom and free speech from “campus gatekeepers.”

If he forms government, Poilievre promises to appoint a former judge which will act as a “Free Speech Guardian” who will ensure that universities respect the principles enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, in particular section 2(b) which protects “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression.”

The former judge will be responsible for ensuring compliance by universities to these principles of academic freedom and free speech, but will also investigate claims of academic censorship.

Examples could include having pro-life or pro-Israel student groups cancel events or lose resources because of their different viewpoints, or having professors such as Jordan Peterson resign his post because of his “unacceptable philosophical positions” from his own account .


The “Free Speech Guardian” would be responsible for enforcing Poilievre’s policy by reporting to the federal government on universities’ breaches and for recommending reductions in direct federal grants to those that do not uphold the principles in the Charter. Federal-provincial transfers would not be affected by the free speech requirements.

Most support professor's use of racist language, in context: poll

U of T talk by anti-Israel activist tests Ontario’s campus free speech policy

There would, however, be limitations to Poilievre’s proposal. Hate speech will continue to be prohibited, as the courts have rules that it can be banned under the Charter.

“The Charter protects free speech, not hate speech, as explained by the Supreme Court of Canada. So does my academic freedom and free speech policy,” said Poilievre in a written statement to the National Post when asked for more specifics.

The idea of withholding federal funds from universities in order to protect free speech on campus is not new. In fact, former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer made this a promise during his own leadership campaign in 2017, and reiterated in his victory speech that “the foundation of our democracy is the ability to have a debate about any subject.”

But education remains a provincial jurisdiction and some provinces have already taken action to do just that.

In 2019, Ontario announced that all colleges and universities had developed, implemented and complied with a free speech policy while ensuring that hate speech and discrimination are not allowed on campus. Alberta also encouraged all publicly funded post-secondary institutions to adopt the Chicago Principles to encourage freedom of speech around that time.

More recently, Quebec adopted a law to enforce new rules around academic freedom across the province, ensuring that “any word” can be spoken in a university classroom as long as it is used in an academic context.

Quebec’s initiative was an indirect response to a University of Ottawa professor’s use of the N-word during a lecture that led to her suspension. The events played out differently in Ontario, where the province’s free speech policy had no effect, and in Quebec, where politicians of all stripes ran to the professor’s defence, invoking her right to use the derogatory word.

Poilievre’s campaign did not respond to followup questions regarding if his free speech policy would let a professor use the N-word in class for academic purposes.

Geneviève Tellier, a professor at the University of Ottawa who co-authored a book to denounce her colleague’s treatment at the time of her suspension, said that Ontario’s free speech policy was already in place when the events happened and did not change anything to the situation.

She seemed skeptical of Poilievre’s suggestion to have a national oversight, adding that it would only add another level of complexity.

“We already have a Free Speech Guardian. It’s the Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” said Tellier in an interview. “And we have the judicial system. Do we need something else? In my opinion, it would only add another administrative burden.”

She also added that Poilievre seems to mix up freedom of speech and academic freedom, stressing that universities do not exist to advance different agendas, but to advance knowledge.

That being said, it came as no surprise to the professor of political studies why the leadership candidate would tap into that theme as part of his campaign.

“Because there’s the word freedom. His whole campaign is driven by freedom.”

These tiny marsupials survived wildfires only to face extinction from feral cats

The Kangaroo Island dunnart was one species seen to reemerge after Australian bushfires

At about 7.5 centimeters long (not counting its tail), this Kangaroo Island dunnart — caught in 2022 during routine monitoring of the island’s wild inhabitants — easily fits in the palm of a hand.
PAT HODGENS


By Asa Stahl
JUNE 16, 2022 

Few marsupials have gone from miraculous survival to the brink of extinction as quickly as the Kangaroo Island dunnart.

In 2019 and 2020, devastating fires burned nearly 10 million hectares of southeastern Australia. The flames threatened hundreds of species with extinction, but the Kangaroo Island dunnart (Sminthopsis aitkeni) — which already numbered less than 500 before the fires — seemed to be one that defied expectations in the aftermath (SN: 3/9/21).

But now these rare creatures may be more at risk than ever, researchers say June 16 in Scientific Reports. The danger, as domestic as it sounds, is getting eaten by a cat.

As of 2008, invasive feral cats had contributed to at least 13 percent of extinctions worldwide. That’s one reason the government has been euthanizing cats on Kangaroo Island for years. The scientists who conducted the dunnart study knew all this — but when they studied the remains of cats euthanized in 2020, they were still surprised by what they saw: Seven out of 86 cats had recently dined on dunnart.

“We were not expecting to find so many,” says Louis Lignereux, a field researcher at the University of Adelaide School of Animal and Veterinary Science. It’s particularly bad news, he says, if you think of what was in the cats as only a snapshot of what they ate in the last 36 hours. Taking that into account, those seven cats alone could have eaten enough to wipe out the Kangaroo Island dunnart within a few months, if they had survived — and there are hundreds of other cats on the island.

A small habitat makes the dunnarts especially vulnerable. It’s like putting all your eggs in one basket, Lignereux says. Since the fires, the Kangaroo Island dunnart is thought to now live in an area about one-tenth of the size of Manhattan (SN: 1/13/20).

“If something happened to this spot,” he says, “then [the dunnart] is gone forever.”

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

CITATIONS

P. Hodgens et al. Cat predation of Kangaroo Island dunnarts in aftermath of bushfire. Scientific Reports. Published online June 16, 2022. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-11383-6.

F.M. Medina et al. A global review of the impacts of invasive cats on island endangered vertebrates. Global Change Biology. Vol. 17, June 3, 2011, p. 3503–3510. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x.

About Asa StahlE-mail
Asa Stahl is the 2022 AAAS Mass Media fellow with Science News. He is a 5th year Astrophysics Ph.D. student at Rice University, where his research focuses on detecting and characterizing young stars and planets.

Western wildfires’ health risks extend across the country

Those fires devastating communities in the West send bad air traveling, boosting emergency room visits in the East

Western wildfires, like the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., are devastating for local communities. Their smoke also travels to heavily populated areas to the east. Researchers are beginning to study the health effects for people far from the fires.
JOSH EDELSON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

By Megan Sever
JUNE 17, 2022

After a relaxing day at the Jersey Shore last July, Jessica Reeder and her son and daughter headed back home to Philadelphia. As they crested a bridge from New Jersey into Pennsylvania, they were greeted with a hazy, yellow-gray sky. It reminded Reeder of the smoky skies she saw growing up in Southern California on days when fires burned in the dry canyons.

Smelling smoke and worried about her asthma and her kids, Reeder flipped the switch to recirculate the air inside the car instead of drawing from the outside. At home, the family closed all the windows and turned their air purifiers on high.

The smoke had traveled from fires raging on the other side of the continent, in the western United States and Canada. Although air quality in Philadelphia didn’t come close to the record-bad air quality that some western cities experienced, it was bad enough to trigger air quality warnings — and not just for people with asthma or heart problems.

Most large U.S. wildfires occur in the West. But the smoke doesn’t stay there. It travels eastward, affecting communities hundreds to thousands of kilometers away from the fires. In fact, the majority of asthma-related deaths and emergency room visits attributed to fire smoke in the United States occur in eastern cities, according to a study in the September 2021 GeoHealth.

Smoke poured into the eastern United States and Canada from wildfires in the West on July 21, 2021 (darker red is denser smoke). Residents of eastern cities received code orange and code red warnings that air quality was unhealthy.

JOSHUA STEVENS/NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY

The big problem is fine particulate matter, tiny particles also known as PM2.5. These bits of ash, gases and other detritus suspended in smoke are no more than 2.5 micrometers wide, small enough to lodge in the lungs and cause permanent damage. PM2.5 exacerbates respiratory and cardiovascular problems and can lead to premature death. The particles can also cause asthma and other chronic conditions in otherwise healthy adults and children.

Over the last few decades, U.S. clean air regulations have cut down on particulate matter from industrial pollution, so the air has been getting cleaner, especially in the populous eastern cities. But the regulations don’t address particulate matter from wildfire smoke, which recent studies show is chemically different from industrial air pollution, potentially more hazardous to humans and increasing significantly.

So far, a lot of the research on how wildfire PM2.5 can make people sick has been based on people living or working near fires in the West. Now, researchers are turning their attention to how PM2.5 from smoke affects the big population centers in the East, far from the wildfires. One thing is clear: With the intensity and frequency of wildfires increasing due to climate change (SN: 12/19/20 & 1/2/21, p. 32), people across North America need to be concerned about the health impacts, says Katelyn O’Dell, an atmospheric scientist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Bad air travels

Air pollution regulations limit PM2.5 from exhaust-emitting cars and trucks and fossil fuel–burning factories and power plants. These regulations have done “a really good job” reducing anthropogenic air pollution in the last couple of decades, says Rosana Aguilera, an environmental scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. In the United States, concentrations of six of the most common air pollutants have dropped by 78 percent since the Clean Air Act of 1970, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. PM2.5 concentrations have come down as well — at least until recently.

Western wildfires, which are growing more frequent, more severe and larger, are erasing some of the gains made in reducing industrial pollution, says Rebecca Buchholz, an atmospheric chemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Fires in the Pacific Northwest are “driving an upward trend” in particulate matter air pollution, Buchholz and colleagues wrote April 19 in Nature Communications. Such smoke pollution peaks in August when fires in the region tend to spike and the atmosphere’s ability to clean itself through, say, rain, is limited. This spike of late-summer air pollution is new, Buchholz says. It’s especially noticeable since 2012.

New York City, visible through hazy skies in September 2020, and many places in the East have seen some of the worst air quality in decades due to fires burning in the U.S. West and in Canada. Such fires are increasing in intensity and frequency.

GARY HERSHORN/GETTY IMAGES PLUS

And, as Reeder and her family experienced last year, transported wildfire pollution is causing substantial particulate matter spikes in the central United States and northeastern North America, Buchholz and colleagues found. Pacific Northwest wildfires thus “have the potential to impact surface air quality, even at large distances downwind of the wildfires,” the team wrote, putting some 23 million people in the central United States and 72 million in northeastern North America at increased risk of health impacts from the imported wildfire smoke.

How far and where PM2.5 travels depends on weather patterns and how high wildfire smoke reaches — the stronger the fire, the longer it can last and the farther smoke can go, and thus the farther particulate matter can reach. Last year, far-away wildfires created unhealthy air quality conditions in locations from the Great Plains to New York City and Washington, D.C.

New York City saw some of its worst air quality in two decades. Philadelphia had two “code red” days — meaning air quality was unhealthy for all — because of the U.S. West and Canadian fires. In 2019, 2020 and 2021, those fires pushed PM2.5 to unhealthy levels in much of Minnesota. In fact, a 2018 study showed that wildfire smoke plumes now waft above Minnesota for eight to 12 days per month between June and September.

Air safety yardstick

The Air Quality Index, or AQI, ranges from 0 to 500, based on the amount of pollution in the air at a given time. Ground-level ozone, particulate matter (both PM10 and PM2.5), carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide are the primary parameters considered in the index. Code orange (above a score of 100) is unhealthy for people with heart and lung disease, older adults, children and people with diabetes. Code red and above (151–500) is unhealthy for everyone.

T. TIBBITTS

Human impacts

Smoke in the West is already having a tangible effect on human health in the East, says O’Dell, lead author of the 2021 GeoHealth study.

Reviewing smoke and health data from 2006 to 2018, O’Dell and colleagues found that more people visit emergency rooms and are hospitalized in the East than in the West from asthma problems attributable to smoke PM2.5. Asthma-related ER visits and hospitalizations were higher east of the Rockies in 11 of the 13 years.

Over the study period, an average of 74 percent of asthma-related deaths and 75 percent of asthma ER visits and hospitalizations attributable to smoke occurred east of the Rockies. Of the estimated 6,300 excess deaths from asthma complications due to smoke PM2.5 that occurred annually over the study period, more than 4,600 were in the East.

Smoke affects so many more people in the East primarily because more people live there, O’Dell notes. Her team defined “West” as west of the Rockies, with a population of 64 million, and “East” as east of the Rockies, home to 226 million people. In the West, smoke PM2.5 causes a higher portion of regional asthma deaths. In the East, it’s a lower portion of the total population, but a far higher total number of people affected.

“We may be already seeing the consequences of these fires on the health of residents who live hundreds or even thousands of miles downwind,” Buchholz said in a press release.

August peaks

Although aerosols, including fine particulate matter, from Pacific Northwest fires have been increasing since 2002, they began a sharp increase in 2012, spiking in the warm, dry summer months. As smoke from the Northwest wafted eastward, similar smaller spikes were seen in the central United States and northeastern North America.
North American seasonal atmospheric aerosol levels, by region

R.R. BUCHHOLZ ET AL/NATURE COMMUNICATIONS 2022 (CC BY 4.0)

Vulnerable youth

“Asthma is a very widespread, common health condition,” says Yang Liu, an environmental scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. In the United States, about 25 million people have asthma, or 8 percent of adults and 7 percent of children, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fine particulate matter can spark asthma attacks, but it can also be a danger to people without the condition. Children are especially vulnerable primarily because of physiology. Children breathe faster so they end up taking in more particulate matter, plus their lungs are smaller so more of their lung surface is likely to be damaged when they breathe in particulate matter. And their lungs are still developing, says Jennifer Stowell, an environmental epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health.

Stowell led a study, reported in the January Environmental Research Letters, estimating how much wildfire smoke will exacerbate asthma attacks in the West. Stowell, Liu and colleagues estimate that, in the 2050s, there will be an additional 155,000 asthma-related ER visits and hospitalizations per wildfire season in the West just from smoke PM2.5. The biggest concern, Stowell says, is for children and younger adults.

Aguilera, of Scripps, and her colleagues found associations between wildfire-specific PM2.5 and pediatric respiratory-related ER and urgent care visits. In San Diego County from 2011 to 2017, wildfire-specific PM2.5 was 10 times as harmful to respiratory health in children 5 and younger as ambient PM2.5, the researchers reported in 2021 in Pediatrics. In fact, the same increase in levels of PM2.5 from smoke versus ambient sources caused a 26 percent higher rate of ER or urgent care visits. The researchers didn’t note whether the children had preexisting asthma.

And even when a wildfire increased PM2.5 by a small amount, respiratory ER and urgent care visits in kids 12 and under increased, Aguilera and colleagues reported in 2020 in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society. “Even relatively smaller wildfires can still generate quite an impact on the pediatric population,” Aguilera says. “And really, any amount of PM or air pollution is harmful.”

Studies of nonhuman primates have also shown permanent effects of smoke on the young — results researchers expect would also apply to humans, given genetic similarities. In 2008, a group of infant rhesus macaques at the California National Primate Research Center at the University of California, Davis was exposed to high PM2.5 levels from a series of devastating wildfires in Northern California. Researchers have been comparing those monkeys with macaques born a year later that weren’t exposed to smoke.

At the California National Primate Research Center, rhesus macaques that were exposed to wildfire smoke early in life have immune disorders, nervous system changes and weakened lungs.

© 2014 KATHY WEST/CALIFORNIA NATIONAL PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER/UC DAVIS

At around age 3, macaques exposed to smoke displayed immune disorders and reduced lung capacity, lung function and lung volume, says Hong Ji, a molecular biologist at UC Davis and the primate center who wasn’t involved with this study. The lungs look like they had fibrosis, Ji says. “Early life smoke exposure … changed the trajectory of lung development,” and it doesn’t appear to be reversible, she says.

The monkeys exposed to wildfire PM2.5 also have important changes to how their DNA works, Ji and colleagues reported in the January Environment International. Exposure to wildfire smoke in infancy can cause life-altering, long-term changes to the monkeys’ nervous and immune systems, as well as brain development, Ji says. Even worse, she says, the DNA changes are the type that can be passed down and may result in generational damage.

Even macaques born after in utero exposure to wildfire smoke can suffer cognitive, immune and hormone problems, primate center researchers reported April 1 in Nature Communications.

Now, Ji and colleagues have teamed with Rebecca Schmidt, a molecular epidemiologist at UC Davis who’s leading a study on the effects of wildfire smoke exposure on pregnant women and young children. This research group, as well as other teams, is also looking into whether PM2.5 is causing genetic changes to babies exposed to smoke in utero, Ji says. The more results gathered on the effects of wildfire PM2.5 on babies and children — and even in pregnancy — the more dangerous we realize it is, Ji says.

Chemical differences

Particulate matter changes as it travels through the atmosphere, both in volume and in chemistry. Some PM2.5 is emitted directly from fires, and some is born from chemicals and trace gases emitted from fires that get chemically processed in the atmosphere, Buchholz says. Reactions that happen in the smoke plume, combined with sunlight, can create even more PM2.5 downwind of the fires. How these particulates change chemically — through interactions between the atmosphere and the particulate matter, and between fire pollution and human pollution — and what that means for human health “is a really active area of research right now,” she says. “It’s super complicated.”

Epidemiological and atmospheric chemistry studies indicate that wildfire PM2.5 is more hazardous to human health than ambient PM2.5, says Stowell, the Boston epidemiologist. One such study compared particulate matter from Amazonian fires with urban sources such as vehicle exhaust in Atlanta. Nga Lee Ng, an atmospheric chemist at Georgia Tech, and colleagues found that smoke particulate matter is more toxic than urban particulate matter, “inducing about five times higher cellular oxidative stress,” Ng says. Oxidative stress damages cells and DNA in the body.

In addition, as smoke travels through the atmosphere and ages, it seems to become even more toxic, Ng says. Reactions between the particulate matter and sunlight and atmospheric gases change the particulate matter’s chemical and physical properties, rendering it even more potentially harmful. So, even though particulate matter dissipates over time and distance, “the health effects per gram are greater,” says Daniel Jaffe, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Washington Bothell.

That means that the studies of health effects near wildfires in the West may not represent the full story of how smoke from distant fires affects people in the East.

Liu, at Emory, hopes to see the U.S. government revisit policies related to what PM2.5 levels are dangerous, since they’re based on ambient and not wildfire-related PM2.5. In March, an EPA advisory panel recommended just that. In a letter to the agency, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee wrote: “Regarding the annual PM2.5 standard, all CASAC members agree that the current level of the annual standard is not sufficiently protective of public health and should be lowered.” The committee added, “There is substantial epidemiologic evidence from both morbidity and mortality studies that the current standard is not adequately protective.”

Local communities throughout the country need to determine when to close schools or at least keep kids inside, Liu says, as well as when to advise people to close windows and turn on air purifiers. Good masks — N95 and KN95 — can help too (yes, masks that block viruses can also block particulate matter).

City, county and state governments also need to prepare the health care system to respond to increased asthma issues, Liu says. Some states are starting to respond. In 2017, for example, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency increased its air quality monitoring stations around the state from two to 18. The agency is also working with the National Weather Service, the Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Department of Transportation to better communicate air quality warnings.

Minnesota, after experiencing a rise in smoky summer days, has added extra air quality monitoring stations to improve local forecasts.

MINNESOTA POLLUTION CONTROL AGENCY

In the meantime, much more research is needed into the human health implications of increasing wildfire smoke, Buchholz says, as well as the chemical interactions in the atmosphere, how climate is changing fires, how fires change year after year, and how they impact the atmosphere, not to mention how different trees, buildings and other fuels affect particulate matter.

“Wildfires are perhaps one of the most visible ways that [climate change] is linked to health,” Stowell says. And the reality is, she says, “we’re going to see it remain as bad or worse for a while.”

Smoke gets on the brain

Health impact studies of air pollution, including wildfire smoke, have mostly focused on the lungs. But toxicologist Matthew Campen of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque is looking at the brain.

In a study of the inflammatory effects of smoke PM2.5 on the brains of mice, Campen and colleagues found that inflammation in the lungs was modest compared with the “profound” inflammation in the brain, Campen says. Given what’s known about how damaging smoke can be in the lungs, to find even greater effects on the brain is troubling, he says.

The inflammatory effect on the mice’s brains was almost immediate, within 24 hours of exposure, the researchers reported in the March Toxicological Sciences. The particulates enter the body through the respiratory system, get in the blood, and are small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier and start affecting the brain. Inflammation has been linked with dementia in older people and neurodevelopmental issues in younger people, plus mood disorders like anxiety and depression, Campen says.

“I’m hoping that our study with mice spurs … epidemiologists to take a look,” he says. “The effects we see are much stronger and more worrisome than what we see in the lungs,” he says, but we don’t know yet at what PM2.5 levels the danger begins. “We need to explore this more rigorously.” — Megan Sever

A version of this article appears in the June 18, 2022 issue of Science News.

CITATIONS

R.R. Buchholz et al. New seasonal pattern of pollution emerges from changing North American wildfires. Nature Communications. Vol. 13. April 19, 2022. doi:10.1038/s41467-022-29623-8.

J.D. Stowell et al. Asthma exacerbation due to climate change-induced wildfire smoke in the Western US. Environmental Research Letters. Vol. 17. January 2022. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ac4138.

R. Aguilera et al. Fine particles in wildfire smoke and pediatric respiratory health in California. Pediatrics. Vol. 147. April 2021. doi:10.1542/peds.2020-027128.

A.P. Brown et al. Long-term effects of wildfire smoke exposure during early life on the nasal epigenome in rhesus macaques. Environment International. Vol. 158. January 2022. doi:10.1016/j.envint.2021.106993.

D. Scieszka et al. Neuroinflammatory and neurometabolomic consequences from inhaled wildfire smoke-derived particulate matter in the western United States. Toxicological Sciences. Vol. 186. March 2022. doi:10.1093/toxsci/kfab147.


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