Weird, noodle-shaped amphibians known as caecilians found in South Florida canal

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FLORIDA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

 

IMAGE: FLORIDA FISH AND WILDLIFE OFFICERS CAPTURED AN AQUATIC CAECILIAN DURING A ROUTINE SURVEY OF MIAMI'S TAMIAMI CANAL. NATIVE TO SOUTH AMERICA, THE SPECIMEN REPRESENTS THE FIRST CAECILIAN RECORDED IN THE WILD IN THE U.S. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF AUSTIN PRECHTEL

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Caecilians have arrived in Miami. Florida Fish and Wildlife biologists captured one of the obscure legless amphibians in the Tamiami Canal, the first example of an introduced caecilian in the U.S.

Florida Museum of Natural History scientists used DNA testing to identify the specimen as the Rio Cauca caecilian, Typhlonectes natans, a native of Colombia and Venezuela. While caecilians – pronounced like “Sicilians” – hunt and scavenge various kinds of small animals, museum experts say it’s too early to predict their potential impact on the local ecosystem.

“Very little is known about these animals in the wild, but there’s nothing particularly dangerous about them, and they don’t appear to be serious predators,” said Coleman Sheehy, Florida Museum’s herpetology collection manager. “They’ll probably eat small animals and get eaten by larger ones. This could be just another non-native species in the South Florida mix.”

Sheehy first learned of the caecilian when FWC officers sent him a photograph in 2019, puzzled at the two-foot-long eel-like animal they had netted in shallow water during a routine survey of the Tamiami Canal, also known as the C-4 Canal. After the caecilian died in captivity, it was sent to the Florida Museum for further analysis. Since then, Sheehy has received several other specimens and reports of caecilians in the canal and will conduct fieldwork in the area to determine their numbers and range.

“At this point, we really don’t know enough to say whether caecilians are established in the C-4 Canal,” he said. “That’s what we want to find out.”

Little is known about this group of reclusive animals. Many caecilians spend their lives burrowed underground while others, including Typhlonectes natans, exclusively inhabit fresh water. Although they resemble worms or snakes, they comprise a separate order of amphibians, distinct from frogs, toads, salamanders and newts. Caecilians can range in size from a few inches to 5 feet long, depending on the species, and have extremely poor eyesight – their name translates to “blind ones.” They also have a pair of sensory tentacles located between their eyes and nostrils, structures that are unique to caecilians and may help them find food.

The northern tip of their range in the Western Hemisphere is southern Mexico, which is home to a group of land-dwelling caecilians, and they’re also found in tropical parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. Fossil remains of ancient caecilian ancestors, dating back more than 170 million years, have been discovered in the American Southwest, but apart from the caecilians recently introduced to South Florida, no representatives of this lineage live in the U.S. today.

“This was not on my radar,” Sheehy said. “I didn’t think we’d one day find a caecilian in Florida. So, this was a huge surprise.”

Typhlonectes natans is the most common caecilian in the pet trade and will breed in captivity, giving birth to live young. Because this species is generally kept in aquariums indoors and can’t easily escape, Sheehy suspects someone discarded their unwanted pets in the canal.

In its native range, Typhlonectes natans lives in warm, slow-moving bodies of shallow water with aquatic vegetation.

“Parts of the C-4 Canal are just like that,” Sheehy said. “This may be an environment where this species can thrive.”

CAPTION

This Rio Cauca caecilian, Typhlonectes natans, was captured in South Florida's Tamiami Canal, the first record of a caecilian living in the wild in the U.S. Originally from South America, the species is common in the international pet trade.

CREDIT

Sheehy published a study describing the discovery in Reptiles & Amphibians.

Other study co-authors are David Blackburn and Marcel Kouete of the Florida Museum and Kelly Gestring, Krissy Laurie, Austin Prechtel, Eric Suarez and Brooke Talley of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

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DOI

10.17161/randa.v28i2.15629

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Case study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

First record of a caecilian (order Gymnophiona, Typhlonectes natans) in Florida and in the United States

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

15-Jul-2021

 

Are laundry and dish pods biodegradable? Not exactly, ASU study shows

Outer pod packaging needs a specific environment to completely biodegrade

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: A NEW ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY STUDY PUBLISHED IN THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH SHOWS THAT AS MUCH AS 75% OF POLYVINYL ALCOHOL (PVA) GOES UNTREATED IN THE U.S. EACH YEAR. THAT AMOUNTS TO ABOUT 8,000 TONS OF THE SYNTHETIC POLYMER BEING RELEASED ANNUALLY ONTO LAND AND INTO WATERWAYS ACROSS THE COUNTRY. view more 

CREDIT: SHIREEN DOOLING

Laundry and dishwasher pods: The simplicity of grabbing a pod and tossing it into a washing machine or dishwasher has made them a popular choice for many consumers for nearly a decade.

Detergent and other ingredients are packaged inside a dissolvable plastic coating called polyvinyl alcohol, or PVA. This synthetic polymer, used since the early 1930s, is water-soluble and breaks apart during the wash cycle, releasing the detergent.

Many companies claim PVA is biodegradable. While it can be fully biodegradable, specific conditions are needed for it to completely biodegrade. These conditions are often unmet. Also, as it dissolves upon contact with water, it can release ethylene, which is a fossil-fuel-based chemical. 

This got two Arizona State University researchers wondering what happens to PVA when it reaches wastewater treatment plants.

“There are very strict conditions needed for PVA to biodegrade, and this is not met within conventional water treatment in the U.S.," said Charlie Rolsky, co-first author of a new study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. "We can look at the literature and assess how much PVA is breaking down, and in what section of the wastewater treatment plant. We can combine that with how much wastewater is generated in the U.S. and how many of these laundry and dish pods are used in the U.S. each year.

“When we put these pieces together, we can project how much PVA goes untreated and is released into the environment,” said Rolsky, a postdoctoral researcher with the ASU Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Material and Manufacturing.

The study, published in June 2021, shows that as much as 75% of PVA goes untreated in the U.S. each year. That amounts to about 8,000 tons of the plastic material being released annually onto land and into waterways across the country.

According to co-first author Varun Kelkar, a PhD candidate and researcher with the Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering, as well as a volunteer with Plastic Oceans International, many companies hire outside firms to create specific biological environments suitable for PVA to degrade. By doing so, the company using PVA in its products can claim it’s biodegradable. But, he said, wastewater treatments plants in the U.S. are generally not built to create optimal conditions for this specific polymer. Instead, they are built to treat human waste and other biological matter.

“According to our model, most of the PVA just passes through the treatment plant,” Kelkar said. “And then it depends. It might completely biodegrade if the environmental conditions are met. And if they’re not met, say in a cool area where the bacterial activity is relatively low, it’s unknown what happens to this large amount of polyvinyl alcohol.”

Both researchers say it’s time to take a closer look at what it actually means for a material to be biodegradable, and whether companies should be allowed to claim their products are biodegradable if they only are so under specific conditions.

“A general understanding of biodegradable is that it’s something that can completely vanish. You throw it into the environment, and like food, it should go away without any side effects and be biologically available to microorganisms for fuel,” Kelkar said. “Yet, we know this is not the case with PVA.”

PVA is used in a wide variety of products — it's often found in textiles, paper, adhesives and paints, and it also has medical, industrial and commercial applications. While Rolsky and Kelkar say they do not intend to vilify PVA as a useful material, they do have concerns about what it may be doing, unnoticed, to the environment.

“A lot of companies are claiming that PVA is biodegradable. It’s not fully degrading,” Rolsky said. “And there really isn’t any literature or research on PVA as a pollutant. We know it’s out there, but we don’t know whether it’s causing harm. We know it can sequester heavy metals and leach into groundwater. It can also alter gas exchanges, which can affect aquatic ecosystems, and we know that ethylene, a byproduct of PVA, is a hormone that plants utilize. It’s important that we study this further.”

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JOURNAL

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

DOI

10.3390/ijerph18116027

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Literature review

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Degradation of Polyvinyl Alcohol in US Wastewater Treatment Plants and Subsequent Nationwide Emission Estimate

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

3-Jun-2021

 

Climate adaptation at the department of defense and beyond

New UArizona-led research identifies climate change challenges faced by US Department of Defense facilities, and solutions that might serve as a model for other large organizations

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

As climate change continues to pose a global threat, new research from the University of Arizona looks at how it may be impacting the world's largest employer: the U.S. Department of Defense.

A team of University of Arizona researchers set out to understand how climate change might affect Department of Defense facilities and activities across the globe, and what actions the department can take to both respond to climate-related threats and reduce its own contributions to climate change.

With a budget larger than many countries and a huge influence on global politics, the DOD has the potential to serve as an example for other large organizations, or even cities, when it comes to climate adaptation and climate change mitigation strategies, say the researchers, whose results are published in the journal Climate Services.

The team looked specifically at four military bases in the southwestern United States: Fort Huachuca in Southern Arizona, Naval Base Coronado in Southern California, and Arizona's Barry M. Goldwater Range East and Barry M. Goldwater Range West.

They worked with liaisons and personnel at each base to identify potential climate-related threats facing the bases and their operations. Then, through workshops and discussions, personnel at each base outlined adaptation and mitigation strategies that the bases should consider implementing, which the UArizona researchers summarized in their paper.

The impacts of climate change have already been felt by some of the bases the researchers studied. For example, the authors write that fires and post-fire flooding are significant concerns for resource managers at Fort Huachuca, and a small wildfire in 2011 burned a section of Naval Base Coronado. Those types of events are likely at least exacerbated by climate change, the researchers write.

"The DOD will need to adapt to climate to protect its own facilities, activities, resources and infrastructure," said study co-author Don Falk, a professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment.

"There have been a surprisingly large number of forward-thinking policy statements related to climate adaptation within the DOD," Falk said. "The department has recognized for a long time that climate change is serious business."

However, putting policies into action at individual bases is not without challenges, which the researchers outline in their study.

The Challenges

Obstacles such as frequent leadership turnover and base officials' limited access to decision makers in the military hierarchy can make it hard to put climate adaptation and mitigation strategies into action, the researchers write.

In addition, the researchers found that climate change commitments by high-ranking officials don't always get translated to action on the ground.

Another issue is insufficient training, capacity and incentives to integrate climate information into short-term and long-term planning.

High turnover among base commanders can also create an environment in which there's lack of attention to long-term issues such as climate change, the researchers write. In most cases, base commanders are at installations for three years at most.

"This is a problem that's endemic across the climate change issue, including within Congress. Elected officials work within election cycles only a few years long," said Gregg Garfin, lead study author and director of the university's Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center.

The Recommendations

The study authors say that making meaningful changes within the department might start with emphasizing risks to DOD missions.

"The department's way of thinking is all about ensuring mission preparedness, and so that's the doorway to working on climate adaptation strategies with them," said Garfin, who is also the director of science translation and outreach for the Arizona Institutes for Resilience and an associate professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment.

Also important, Garfin said, is finding champions at individual bases to lead climate adaptation efforts.

"These are people who will step up and take on this issue, which we found was really critical," Garfin said.

The DOD also can pursue climate-related partnerships with nearby land owners and other organizations, the researchers write.

"The department can coordinate and learn from other organizations and share their learning with their neighbors as well, so the department doesn't have to do all the heavy lifting," Garfin said. "Building this kind of culture of adaptation to climate change across many entities, I think, will make a large impact."

In addition, the researchers suggest that the department integrate climate considerations into existing plans.

"Instead of putting a new burden on installations to develop a new standalone climate plan, they can incorporate some risk information into existing plans and operations," Garfin said. "That seems to be the major solution."

Some of the easiest changes will likely be operational, say the researchers. For example, aircraft use huge amounts of energy and produce huge amounts of pollution, Falk said, so bases might consider operating solely on electric vehicles.

An existing example of a military base practicing climate adaptation is the solar power plant at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. The base has the Air Force's largest operational solar array, which provides a large chunk of the base's power needs.

The UArizona research team hopes similar measures can be enacted across the country.

"As a climate scientist, it was really refreshing to find that at the federal level, the DOD had made many clear, unambiguous fact-based statements about climate," Falk said. "Their job is to recognize threats and concerns that involve the security of their facilities, activities and the country at large."

The researchers believe their findings can be applied to other large organizations, or even cities, that are facing similar pressures and challenges related to climate change.

"I think the involvement of the Department of Defense could be a true game changer for the whole process of climate adaptation in our society, for at least two reasons," Falk said. "They are so large, with a gigantic energy and resource footprint, and anything they do is going to have a ripple effect. Secondly, the military has credibility. When the military comes around on something, people listen."

###

The study was co-authored by UArizona's Katharine Jacobs, Christopher O'Connor, Arin Haverland, Jeremy Weiss, Adriana Zuñiga-Terán and the late Raphael Sagarin, who was principal investigator on the project until his passing in 2015. Additional co-authors are Anna Haworth and Alastair Baglee from the risk management consulting firm Willis Towers Watson in Cardiff, Wales, and Jonathan Overpeck at the University of Michigan. The study was funded by the DOD's Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program.

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JOURNAL

Climate Services

DOI

10.1016/j.cliser.2021.100230

ARTICLE TITLE

A new mission: Mainstreaming climate adaptation in the US Department of Defense

 

Managing earthquakes triggered by oil production

Scientists demonstrate safer wastewater disposal method

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - RIVERSIDE

 

IMAGE: OIL PRODUCTION GENERATES LARGE VOLUMES OF WASTEWATER, WHICH IS OFTEN INJECTED INTO THE GROUND AS A MEANS OF DISPOSAL TO AVOID POLLUTING SURFACE WATERS. THE INJECTIONS CAN CAUSE EARTHQUAKES. view more 

CREDIT: UCR

A team of scientists has developed an approach to disposing wastewater that reduces the danger of triggering an earthquake.

Oil production generates large volumes of wastewater, which is often injected into the ground as a means of disposal to avoid polluting surface waters. However, injections have the potential to cause earthquakes.

A study documenting the method devised by a multidisciplinary team of scientists to avoid such earthquakes has been published today in the journal Nature. Their method was tested in western Europe’s largest onshore oil field, the Val d’Agri field in southern Italy.

Hundreds of small earthquakes were detected there after field operators injected wastewater into an abandoned well in 2006. 

“The earthquakes were detected within hours of injection,” said James Dietrich, study co-author and UC Riverside distinguished professor emeritus of geophysics. “The cause and effect relationship was clear.”

Wanting to learn what levels of injection are safe, the field operators convened a team from UCR, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Texas. 

Dieterich took data gathered in the field and created models that accurately reproduced seismic events observed between 1993 and 2016. Based on studies conducted in Dieterich’s laboratory, his models help explain how a small change in the amount of stress on a fault can result in a large change in the rate of earthquakes.

The research team then used models to forecast the effects of using three different water injection rates. They determined that a relatively low injection rate was sustainable and should not induce shaking. 

Between January 2017 and June 2019, these projections were tested in the field, and seismic activity was consistent with the predicted levels. The authors suggest that this approach can be used to manage earthquakes generated by other activities, such as carbon sequestration.

This strategy to reduce global warming involves capturing industrial carbon dioxide and putting it into the ground rather than the atmosphere. 

“One of the big impediments to this is that gigantic volumes of fluids injected into the ground will probably trigger earthquakes,” Dieterich said. “How can that be managed? We’ve learned a little here that may help along those lines, and for related problems like fracking.”

###
 

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JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-021-03668-z

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

A process-based approach to understanding and managing triggered seismicity

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

28-Jul-2021

 

Environmental impact of bottled water up to 3,500 times higher than tap water

A new study compares the health and environmental impacts of individual water consumption choices in Barcelona

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BARCELONA INSTITUTE FOR GLOBAL HEALTH (ISGLOBAL)

What is the best option for individual water consumption if we take into account both health and environmental impacts? The answer to that question, according to a new study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health ( ISGlobal), a centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, is that, at least in the city of Barcelona, tap water is the option that offers more overall benefits.

The consumption of bottled water has been increasing sharply in the last years on a global scale. According to previous research, this trend can be partly explained by subjective factors like risk perception, taste, odour, lack of trust in public tap water quality and marketing by bottled water companies. This new study, published inScience of the Total Environment, was aimed at providing objective data about three different water consumption choices: bottled water, tap water and filtered tap water. This scientific work has been carried out in collaboration with the Group of Environmental Engineering and Microbiology ( GEMMA) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya·BarcelonaTech (UPC).

Environmental and health impacts are usually assessed separately due to the different methodologies applied and resulting outcomes. Environmental impacts can be estimated with a methodology called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), while the consequences in human health are estimated with an approach called Health Impact Assessment (HIA). This study has tried to overcome this methodological barrier for the first time by combining LCA and HIA in the same analysis.

Since tap water quality might differ between cities or countries, the research team focused in the city of Barcelona, due to the robustness of available data. The Life Cycle Assessment was conducted using a specific software and a method called ReCiPe, which allowed researchers to estimate the damage to ecosystems and to resource availability as well as indirect impacts in human health derived from the production process of bottled and tap water. The Health Impact Assessment used data on water consumption patterns and on levels of chemical compounds in water supply from the Barcelona Public Health Agency.

Results showed that if the whole population of Barcelona decided to shift to bottled water, the production required would take a toll of1.43 species lost per year and cost of 83.9 million USD per year due to extraction of raw materials. This is approximately1,400 times more impact in ecosystems and 3,500 times higher cost of resource extraction compared to the scenario where the whole population would shift to tap water.

“Tap water quality has increased substantially in Barcelona since the incorporation of advanced treatments over the last years. However, this considerable improvement has not been mirrored by an increase in tap water consumption, which suggests that water consumption could be motivated by subjective factors other than quality ”, says Cristina Villanueva, ISGlobal researcher and first author of the study.

“One of this subjective factors is the perceived presence of chemical compounds in tap water. While it is true that tap water may contain trihalomethanes (THM) derived from the disinfection process and that THMs are associated with bladder cancer, our study shows that due to the high quality of the tap water in Barcelona, the risk for health is small, especially when we take into account the overall impacts of bottled water”, adds Cristina Villanueva.

In this sense, the results estimate that a complete shift to tap water would increase the overall number of years of life lost in the city of Barcelona to 309 (which equals approximately on average 2 hours of lost life expectancy if borne equally by all residents of Barcelona). Adding domestic filtration to tap water would reduce that risk considerably , lowering the total number of years of life lost to 36.

“Our results show that considering both the environmental and the health effects, tap water is a better option than bottled water, because bottled water generates a wider range of impacts”, says Cathryn Tonne, ISGlobal researcher and last author of the study. “The use of domestic filters, in addition to improving the taste and odour of tap water, can reduce substantially THMs levels in some cases. For this reason, filtered tap water is a good alternative. Even though we didn’t have enough data to measure its environmental impact fully, we know it is much lower than that of bottled water”, she adds. However, the authors acknowledge that domestic filtering devices require an adequate maintenance for a proper performance and to avoid microbial proliferation.

###

Reference

Cristina M. Villanueva, Marianna Garfí, Carles Milà, Sergio Olmos, Ivet Ferrer, Cathryn Tonne, Health and environmental impacts of drinking water choices in Barcelona, Spain: A modelling study, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 795, 2021, 148884, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.148884

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DOI

10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.148884

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Health and environmental impacts of drinking water choices in Barcelona

 

Exploring blood types of Neanderthal and Denisovan individuals

Ancient blood types contribute new evidence for the origins, history, and demise of archaic humans

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: ERYTHROID BLOOD GROUP DISTRIBUTION FROM DENISOVA AND NEANDERTHAL ARCHAIC GENOMES. BRANCHING MATCHES NUCLEAR DNA TREE TOPOLOGY [43]. BLUE, NEANDERTHAL LINEAGE; RED, DENISOVAN LINEAGE. MADE WITH NATURAL EARTH. FREE VECTOR AND RASTER MAP DATA @ NATURALEARTHDATA.COM. view more 

CREDIT: CONDEMI ET AL, 2021, PLOS ONE (CC-BY 4.0, HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

An analysis of the blood types of one Denisovan and three Neanderthal individuals has uncovered new clues to the evolutionary history, health, and vulnerabilities of their populations. Silvana Condemi of the Centre National de la Research Scientifique (CNRS) and colleagues at Aix-Marseille University, France, present hese findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on July 28, 2021.

Neanderthals and Denisovans were ancient humans who lived across Eurasia, from Western Europe to Siberia, from about 300,000 to 40,000 years ago. Previous research efforts have produced full-genome DNA sequences for 15 of these ancient individuals, greatly enhancing understanding of their species. However, despite being encoded in DNA, these ancient individuals' blood types have received little attention.

In the new study, Condemi and colleagues investigated the previously sequenced genomes of one Denisovan and three Neanderthal individuals (ranging from 100,000 to 40,000 years ago)in order to determine their blood types and analyze the implications. While 43 different systems exist for assigning blood types, the researchers focused on seven systems that are often used in medical settings for blood transfusions.

This analysis of the four individuals' blood types revealed new information about their species. For instance, the ancient individuals had blood type alleles--different versions of the same gene--in combinations that are consistent with the idea that Neanderthals and Denisovans originated in Africa.

In addition, a distinct genetic link between the Neanderthal blood types and the blood types of an Aboriginal Australian and an indigenous Papuan suggests the possibility of mating between Neanderthals and modern humans before modern humans migrated to Southeast Asia.

The Neanderthal individuals also had blood type alleles associated with increased vulnerability to diseases affecting fetuses and newborns, as well as reduced variability of many alleles compared to modern humans. This pattern is in line with existing evidence that links low genetic diversity and low reproductive success with the eventual demise of Neanderthals.

Overall, these findings highlight the relevance of blood types in understanding humans' evolutionary history.

The authors add: "This work identifies the blood group systems in Neandertals and Denisovans in order to better understand their evolutionary history and to consolidate hypotheses concerning their dispersal in Eurasia and interbreeding with early Homo sapiens.

The results of the Groups system analysis of Neandertals and Denisovans confirm their African origin as well as the weakness in their fertility and susceptibility to virus infection leading to a high infant mortality rate."

###

Citation: Condemi S, Mazières S, Faux P, Costedoat C, Ruiz-Linares A, Bailly P, et al. (2021) Blood groups of Neandertals and Denisova decrypted. PLoS ONE 16(7): e0254175. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254175

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0254175

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0254175

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are

 

Bronze Age cemetery reveals history of a high-status woman and her twins

And migration patterns within her Vatya community

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: LEFT: BONE ASSEMBLAGE FROM BURIAL N. 241A (ADULT FEMALE INDIVIDUAL). RIGHT: BONES ATTRIBUTABLE TO BOTH FOETUSES (N. 241B AND 241C). view more 

CREDIT: CAVAZZUTI ET AL, 2021, PLOS ONE (CC-BY 4.0, HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

Ancient urn graves contain a wealth of information about a high-ranking woman and her Bronze Age Vatya community, according to a study published July 28, 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Claudio Cavazzuti from the University of Bologna, Italy, and Durham University, UK, and colleagues.

People of the Vatya culture that flourished during the Hungarian Early and Middle Bronze Ages (approximately 2200-1450 BCE) customarily cremated the deceased--making the human remains difficult to analyze from a bioarchaeological perspective. In this study, the authors used new osteological sampling strategies to learn more about the people buried in the urnfield cemetery at Szigetszentmiklós-Ürgehegy, one of the largest Middle Bronze Age urn cemeteries in Central Hungary.

Cavazzuti and colleagues analyzed human tissues from 29 graves (three whole burials, or inhumations, and 26 urn cremations) and applied strontium isotope comparison techniques to test if sampled individuals were local to the geographic area. For the majority of sampled graves, each contained the remains of a single individual and simple grave goods made of ceramic or bronze; however, gravesite 241 was of special interest: this grave contained an urn with the cremated remains of an adult woman and two fetuses, buried alongside prestigious grave goods including a golden hair-ring, a bronze neck-ring, and two bone hairpin ornaments.

Though the three inhumed individuals were poorly preserved, the authors were able to confirm these had been adults, though they couldn't determine the sex. Of the 26 cremated individuals, seven appeared to be adult males, 11 adult females, and two appeared to be adults whose sex couldn't be determined. They also identified children's remains: two individuals likely 5-10 years of age, and four individuals ranging from 2-5 years of age--the youngest present aside from the twin fetuses buried with the adult woman in grave 241, which were approximately 28-32 gestational weeks of age. The authors believe the woman in grave 241 may have died due to complications bearing or birthing these twins. Her remains indicate she was 25 to 35 years old at her time of death and the remains were especially carefully collected post-cremation, as her grave exhibited a bone weight 50 percent higher than the average sampled grave. The strontium analysis also revealed she was likely born elsewhere and moved to Szigetszentmiklós in early adolescence, between the ages of 8-13. One other adult woman also appeared non-local to Szigetszentmiklós, with the adult women in general featuring a more varied strontium isotope composition than the adult men, whose isotopes were concentrated in an especially small range--even narrower than those of the children analyzed in the study.

The authors note their findings at the Szigetszentmiklós urnfield reinforce evidence that women, especially of high rank, commonly married outside their immediate group in Bronze Age Central Europe--and confirm the informative potential of strontium isotope analyses even for cremated remains.

The authors add: "Thanks to a wide spectrum of new bioarchaeological methods, techniques and sampling strategies, it is now possible to reconstruct the life-histories of cremated people of the Bronze Age. In this case, the authors investigate the movements and the tragic events of a high-status woman's life, settled along the Danube 4000 years ago, in the territory of modern-day Hungary."

CAPTION

Grave goods from burial n. 241: 1. Bronze neck-ring (Ösenring); 2. Gold hair-ring (Noppenring); 3. Bone pins/needles (Knochennadeln).

CREDIT

Cavazzuti et al, 2021, PLOS ONE (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Press-only preview: https://plos.io/2V37UyH

Contact: Dr. Claudio Cavazzuti, claudio.cavazzuti3@unibo.it, Ph.: +39 3389095308

Image Captions: 1) Left: Bone assemblage from burial n. 241a (adult female individual). Right: Bones attributable to both foetuses (n. 241b and 241c). 2) Grave goods from burial n. 241: 1. Bronze neck-ring (Ösenring); 2. Gold hair-ring (Noppenring); 3. Bone pins/needles (Knochennadeln).

Image Credit: Cavazzuti et al, 2021, PLOS ONE (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Citation: Cavazzuti C, Hajdu T, Lugli F, Sperduti A, Vicze M, Horváth A, et al. (2021) Human mobility in a Bronze Age Vatya 'urnfield' and the life history of a high-status woman. PLoS ONE 16(7): e0254360. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0254360

Funding: This paper was supported by the Guest Researcher Fellowship granted by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; by the Momentum Mobility research project hosted by the Institute of Archaeology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence (Principal Investigator: Viktória Kiss) and by the grant from Hungarian Research, Development and Innovation Office, project number: FK128013 (Principal Investigator: Hajdu Tamás). The 14C measurements, conducted by the Atomki Laboratory, Debrecen were supported by the European Union and the State of Hungary, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund in the project of GINOP-2.3.2-15-2016-00009 'ICER'.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0254360

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0254360

 

Global warming may lead to more variable hydroclimate

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES HEADQUARTERS

Global wet regions will not only receive more rainfall, but also experience temporally more varied rainfall events under global warming, according to researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the UK Meteorological (Met) Office.

Their study was published in Science Advances on July 28.

From drinking water to hydroelectric energy, the amount of rainfall we receive, and when we receive it, has a significant impact on society and the environment. Rainfall variability is tightly associated with the occurrence of droughts and floods.

Using the Met Office's state-of-the-art climate model simulations and projections, scientists found that in a future warming world, climatologically wet regions will not only get wetter but also more variable, with greater differences between wet and dry conditions.

The increase in rainfall variability, on the whole, is projected to be larger than the increase in average rainfall, with the global mean increase in rainfall variability more than twice as large as the increase in mean rainfall (in a percentage sense).

"As climate warms, climatologically wet regions will generally get wetter and dry regions get drier. Such a global pattern of mean rainfall change is often described as 'wet-get-wetter'. By analogy, the global pattern of rainfall variability change features a 'wet-get-more variable' paradigm," said ZHOU Tianjun, corresponding author of the study.

ZHOU is a senior scientist at IAP and the CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences of CAS. He is also a professor at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Physically, while warming-induced atmospheric moistening acts to enhance rainfall variability worldwide, regional patterns of change in rainfall variability are dominated by change in circulation variability. "This highlights the importance of improving our understanding of future circulation changes, which is also an important source of uncertainty in climate change projections," said ZHANG Wenxia, lead author of the study.

"The amplified rainfall variability manifests the fact that global warming is making our climate more uneven--more extreme in both wet and dry conditions, with wider and probably more rapid transitions between them," added ZHANG. The resulting wider swings from one extreme to another will challenge the existing climate resilience of infrastructures, human society and ecosystems.

By simultaneously taking into account changes in the mean state and variability of precipitation, the research provides a new perspective for interpreting future precipitation change regimes. Around two-thirds of land will face a "wetter and more variable" hydroclimate, while the remaining land regions are projected to become "drier but more variable" or "drier and less variable."

"This classification of different precipitation change regimes is valuable for regional adaptation planning," said Kalli Furtado, Expert Scientist at the Met Office and second author of the study. "For most regions, the increasing rainfall variability, which could translate into impacts on crop yields and river flows, makes climate change adaptation more difficult."

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The study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, the International Partnership Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the UK-China Research Innovation Partnership Fund.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Mathematical Sciences Advances and Applications

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.abf8021