Why fish look down when they swim

Quirky behavior helps fish estimate swimming direction and speed, simulations show

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

 

VIDEO: WATCH A ZEBRAFISH SWIM ALONG WITH SHIFTING PATTERNS, PROJECTED ONTO THE BOTTOM OF ITS TANK. THIS EXPERIMENT PROVIDED EVIDENCE THAT FISH TAKE VISUAL MOTION CUES FROM BELOW. view more 

CREDIT: TOD THIELE/UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

Just as you might look down at the sidewalk as you walk, fish look downward when they swim, a new study by a Northwestern University-led international collaboration has confirmed.

The study is the first to combine simulations of zebrafish’s brain, native environment and spatially-varying swimming behavior into one computational model. By analyzing this model, the researchers concluded that this quirk — looking down while swimming forward — is an adaptive behavior that evolved to help the fish self-stabilize, as when swimming against a current.

As water moves, fish are constantly trying to self-stabilize in order to stay in place — rather than getting swept away in a moving stream. Focusing on other fish, plants or debris might give the fish a false sensation that it’s moving. The stable riverbed below them, however, gives fish more reliable information about their swimming direction and speed. 

“It’s similar to sitting on a train car that isn’t moving. If the train next to yours starts to pull to away from the station, it can trick you into thinking you are moving too,” said Northwestern’s Emma Alexander, who led the study. “The visual cue from the other train is so strong that it overrides the fact that all of your other senses are telling you that you are sitting still. That’s exactly the same phenomenon that we are studying in fish. There are many misleading motion cues above them, but the most abundant and reliable signals are from the bottom of the river.”

The study will be published Nov. 2 in the journal Current Biology.

Alexander is an assistant professor of computer science in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, where she runs the Bio Inspired Vision Lab.

The researchers collected video data a forested stream with a sandy substrate and low-to-medium flow.

CREDIT

E. Alexander/Northwestern University

Going ‘back to the source’

To conduct the research, Alexander and her collaborators focused on zebrafish, a well-studied model organism. But, although many laboratories have tanks full of zebrafish, the team wanted to focus on the fish’s native environment in India.

“It was recently discovered that fish respond to motion below them more strongly than motion above them. We wanted to dig into that mystery and understand why,” Alexander explained. “Many zebrafish that we study grow up in lab tanks, but their native habitats shaped the evolution of their brains and behaviors, so we needed to go back to the source to investigate the context for where the organism developed.”

Armed with camera equipment, the team visited seven sites across India to gather video data of shallow rivers, where zebrafish naturally live. The field team encased a 360-degree camera inside a waterproof diving case and attached it to a remotely-controlled robotic arm. Then, they used the robotic arm to plunge the camera into the water and move it around.

“It allowed us to put our eyes where the fish eyes would be, so it’s seeing what the fish see,” Alexander said. “From the video data, we were able to model hypothetical scenarios where a simulated fish moved arbitrarily through a realistic environment.”

‘Wait for me!’

Back in the lab, the team also tracked zebrafish’s motions inside a ball of LEDs. Because fish have a large field of view, they do not have to move their eyes to look around like people do. So, the researchers played motion stimuli across the lights and watched the fishes’ responses. When patterns appeared on the bottom of the tank, the fish swam along with the moving patterns — more evidence that the fish were taking their visual cues from looking downward.

“If you play a video with moving stripes, the fish will move along with the stripes,” Alexander said. “It’s like they are saying ‘wait for me!’ In the behavioral experiment, we counted their tail beats. The more they wagged their tails, the more they wanted to keep up with the moving stripes.”

The team then abstracted data from its videos and combined it with data from how motion signals get encoded into the fish’s brain. They fed the datasets into two pre-existing algorithms used for studying optic flow (or the movement of the world across our eyes or camera lenses). 

Ultimately, they discovered that in both scenarios — in the wild and in the lab — zebrafish look down when swimming forward. The researchers concluded that fish look down to understand their environment’s motion and then swim to counteract it — to avoid being swept away.

“We tied everything together into a simulation that showed that, in fact, this is an adaptive behavior,” said Alexander, who led the computational part of the study. “The water surface is constantly moving, and other fish and plants are moving by. Fish are better off omitting that information and focusing on the information below them. Riverbeds have a lot of texture, so fish are seeing strong features they can track.”

Building better robots

Not only does this information gives some insight into fishes’ behavior, it could also inform designs for artificial vision systems and sophisticated bio-inspired robots.

“If you were making a fish-inspired robot and you just looked at its anatomy, you might think ‘the eyes are pointing sideways, so I’m going to point my cameras sideways,’” Alexander said. “But it turns out that the eyes are pointing sideways because they are balancing several tasks. We think they point sideways because it’s a compromise — they look upward to hunt and downward to swim.”

The study, “Optic flow in the natural habitats of zebrafish supports spatial biases in visual self-motion estimation,” was supported by the Human Frontier Science Program Young Investigator grant (HSFP RGY0079), the National Institutes of Health (grant number NIH EY003176) and the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (grant number EXC307).

---

JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2022.10.009 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Optic Flow in the Natural Habitats of Zebrafish Supports Spatial Biases in Visual Self-Motion Estimation

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Nov-2022

Permanent daylight savings time results in fewer car accidents with animals

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CELL PRESS

The practice of moving our clocks forward, resulting in a later sunset, reduces night-time associated car accidents with deer by 16 percent. Researchers developed a model, publishing November 2 in the journal Current Biology, that demonstrates the benefits that permanent daylight savings time has, not only in saving animal lives but also in reduction of collision costs and human injuries. 

“We saw these huge, abrupt shifts in human activity associated with the timing of sunrise and sunset, so it got us thinking if humans are responding to clock time, whereas animals are responding to the daylight time, does that then create more opportunities for human wildlife conflict?” says first author Calum Cunningham (@CalXCunningham), a biologist from the University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

Using data from 23 state agencies from the US Department of Transportation, Cunningham’s team analyzed 1,012,465 deer-vehicle collisions and 96 million hourly traffic observations across the United States. Their analysis showed that collisions are 14 times more frequent 2 hours after sunset than before. Even more striking, the rate of deer-vehicle collisions increased by 16 percent the week following the change to standard time. 

Taking these numbers, the researchers were able to predict that if daylight savings time became year-round it would prevent 36,550 deer deaths, 33 human deaths, 2,054 human injuries, and $1.19 billion in collision costs annually. The data on car collisions is most likely vastly underreported, and these numbers are likely to be much larger than stated.  

“It surprised me how striking this pattern was, of how much more likely deer are to get struck in the hour or two after darkness," says Cunningham. “This one-hour shift in human activity could have such a significant effect.” 

### 

Current Biology, Cunningham et al, “Permanent daylight saving time would reduce deer-vehicle collisions” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(22)01615-3 

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit: http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.  

---

JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2022.10.007 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Permanent daylight saving time would reduce deer-vehicle collisions

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Nov-2022

Permanent daylight saving time would reduce deer-vehicle collisions, study shows

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

In much of the United States, there is a twice-yearly shift in timekeeping between standard time and daylight saving time, or DST, which delays both sunrise and sunset to make mornings darker and evenings brighter. Recently, scientists, policy experts, lawmakers and citizens have debated abandoning the twice-a-year switch and adopting either year-round standard time or DST.

A team of researchers at the University of Washington — led by postdoctoral researcher Calum Cunningham and Laura Prugh, an associate professor of quantitative wildlife sciences — have found that one of those options would sharply reduce a hazard common to much of the country: deer-vehicle collisions. In a paper published Nov. 2 in Current Biology, they report that adopting permanent DST in the United States would reduce deer-vehicle collisions and likely prevent an estimated 36,550 deer deaths, 33 human deaths, 2,054 human injuries and $1.19 billion in costs each year. Deer-vehicle collisions would decrease under permanent DST because skies would be brighter later into the evening.

There are an estimated 2.1 million deer-vehicle collisions in the United States each year, killing about 440 people, causing 59,000 injuries and costing upwards of $10 billion.

“Wildlife-vehicle collisions are a huge and growing problem,” said Cunningham. “There are social costs — people killed and injured — and it’s also a conservation problem as it’s one of the largest sources of human-caused mortality of wildlife.”

Cunningham, Prugh and their colleagues analyzed wildlife-vehicle collision data from 23 states. The vast majority of these were collisions involving two widespread species of deer, white-tailed deer that predominate in the eastern U.S. and mule deer, which are more common in the western U.S. 

The dataset, which includes more than 1 million deer-vehicle collisions from 1994 to 2021, revealed that the risk of deer-vehicle collision depends on the overlap of both human and deer activity. Deer and related species are crepuscular, meaning they are most active around dawn and dusk. The team found that most collisions occurred in the hours between sunset and sunrise the next morning. Collisions were 14 times more frequent two hours after sunset than two hours before sunset.

The researchers found that deer-vehicle collisions peak in the fall, with nearly 10% occurring during the two-week period around the switch from DST to standard time. The shift itself causes an abrupt increase in the amount of driving after sunset, which corresponded with a 16% increase in deer-vehicle collisions in the week following the time shift. 

For ungulates like deer, fall is also the “rut,” their mating season, during which their activity level increases by as much as 50%. 

“We believe that this fall spike really happens due to the overlap of these two factors: the breeding season and the change from daylight saving time back to standard time,” said Prugh. “We don’t see a corresponding shift in deer-vehicle collisions in the spring during the other time change, and we believe that’s in part because spring is not a breeding season for deer.”

The patterns that Cunningham, Prugh and their colleagues found on deer-vehicle collisions allowed them to model collisions under permanent standard time and permanent DST. They estimate an increase of 73,660 deer-vehicle collisions under permanent standard time, with 66 additional human deaths and 4,140 additional injuries, and an added $2.39 billion in collision costs. Permanent DST showed the opposite trend, with a decrease of about 2.3% in deer-vehicle collisions over a full year. Both scenarios would do away with increased accidents caused specifically by the biannual time-shift and the subsequent “social jetlag” caused by out-of-sync circadian rhythms.

Vehicle collisions are a major source of human-wildlife conflict. Since human societies in modern times tend to live their lives more by clocks than the sun’s position in the sky, understanding the factors that lead to these collisions could help save lives and prevent injury, Cunningham said.

“Humans today have this ‘evening bias’ in our activity: we get up later and stay active later than what the sun is telling us to do,” said Cunningham. “As long as people are living their lives ‘by the clock,’ which animals do not, people need to be aware of risks and make adjustments where we can. If people are thinking about what they can do for wildlife and for their own lives, reducing driving during dark hours is likely to help significantly. In areas with deer, the risk of harming wildlife and yourself while driving is 14 times higher when it is dark.”

Co-authors on the paper are Tristan Nuñez, Yasmine Hentati, Ben Sullender, Catherine Breen, Taylor Ganz, Samantha Kreling, Kayla Shively, Ellie Reese and Jeff Miles, all in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. Cunningham was funded by the Australian Fulbright Commission.

###

For more information, contact Cunningham at cxcunn@uw.edu and Prugh at lprugh@uw.edu. 

 

---

JOURNAL

Current Biology

DOI

10.1016/j.cub.2022.10.007 

ARTICLE TITLE

Permanent daylight saving time would reduce deer-vehicle collisions

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Nov-2022

LINUS PAULING WAS RIGHT

Vitamin C may hold the key to improve efficacy of dendritic cell-derived anticancer cell therapies

Peer-Reviewed Publication

JOSEP CARRERAS LEUKAEMIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE

 

IMAGE: THE MEMBERS OF THE BALLESTAR LAB. view more 

CREDIT: JOSEP CARRERAS LEUKAEMIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Researchers from the Epigenetics and Immune Disease Lab at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute has recently shown that vitamin C improves the immunogenic properties of dendritic cells, in vitro. Results recently made public show that treating the cells with vitamin C leads to a more consistent activation of genes involved in the immune response, mainly through DNA demethylation, a kind of epigenetic reprogramming. This discovery may be useful to generate more potent dendritic cell-based therapies in the future.

Since the onset of anticancer cell therapies, those that use living cells to find and eliminate tumors, many types of immune cells have been used. The best-known cell therapies use lymphocytes, as in the highly successful CAR-T therapies. Recently, dendritic cells have attracted the scientists’ attention thanks to its ability to uptake and present antigens (small parts of a pathogen or a cancer cell) to the T-lymphocytes and induce an antigen-specific potent immune activation. On this regard, loading dendritic cells with specific antigens to create immune memory constitute the so-called DC-vaccines.

To study dendritic cells in the lab, researchers differentiate them from monocytes (also an immune cell) using a particular set of molecular signaling. This differentiation is accomplished through a complex set of gene activation processes in the nucleus, mostly thanks to the activity of the chromatin remodeling machinery spearheaded by the TET family of demethylases, proteins that act upon the DNA epigenetic marks.

Vitamin C was known to interact with several TET proteins to enhance its activity, but the specific mechanism was still poorly understood in human cells. In a recent publication at the prestigious journal Nucleic Acids Research, a team lead by Dr. Esteban Ballestar hypothesized that treating monocytes in vitro while differentiating into dendritic cells, would help the resulting cells be more mature and active.

The results obtained by Octavio Morante-Palacios, first author of the publication, José Luis Sardina (also from the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute) and Eva Martínez-Cáceres, Head of Immunology of the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute, show that vitamin C treatment triggers an extensive demethylation at NF- kB/p65 binding sites compared with non-treated cells, promoting the activity of genes involved in antigen presentation and immune response activation. Also, vitamin C increases the communication of the resulting dendritic cells with other components of the immune system and stimulates the proliferation of antigen-specific T cells.

Actually, the researchers proved that vitamin C-stimulated dendritic cells loaded with antigens specific for the SARS-CoV-2 virus were able to activate T cells in vitro more efficiently than non-treated cells, showing the superiority of DC-vaccines treated with vitamin C.

Overall, these new findings support the hypothesis that treating monocyte-derived dendritic cells with vitamin C may help generate DC-vaccines with higher performance. After consolidating these results in preclinical models and, hopefully, in clinical trials, a new generation of cell therapies based on dendritic cells may be used in the clinic to fight cancer more efficiently.

Reference article:

Octavio Morante-Palacios, Gerard Godoy-Tena, Josep Calafell-Segura, Laura Ciudad, Eva M Martínez-Cáceres, José Luis Sardina, Esteban Ballestar. “Vitamin C enhances NF-κB-driven epigenomic reprogramming and boosts the immunogenic properties of dendritic cells”. Nucleic Acids Research, 2022; gkac941, https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkac941

---

JOURNAL

Nucleic Acids Research

DOI

10.1093/nar/gkac941 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Cells

ARTICLE TITLE

Vitamin C enhances NF-κB-driven epigenomic reprogramming and boosts the immunogenic properties of dendritic cells

Sensitivity to musical rhythm supports social development in infants

New study reveals that the universal behavior of singing to infants synchronizes caregiver-infant social engagement

Peer-Reviewed Publication

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

 

IMAGE: SILAS LACAGNIN GAZES AT HIS MOTHER, ANSLEY LACAGNIN, WHILE SHE SINGS TO HIM. view more 

CREDIT: VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

Engaging infants with a song provides a readymade means for supporting social development and interaction, according to a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), Marcus Autism Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Emory University School of Medicine enrolled 112 infants who were either 2 months or 6 months old. 

 

The study tracked infants’ moment-by-moment eye-looking to reveal that the rhythm of caregivers’ singing causes infant eye-looking to become synchronized or entrained to the caregivers’ social cues at sub-second timescales. 

 

As early as 2 months of age, when infants are first engaging with others in an interactive manner, infants were two times more likely to look to the singers’ eyes time-locked to the musical beat than would be expected by chance.

 

By 6 months of age, when infants are highly experienced in face-to-face musical games and are developing increasingly sophisticated rhythmic and communicative behaviors like babbling, they were more than four times as likely to look to the singers’ eyes synchronized to the musical beats. 

 

“Singing to infants seems like such a simple act, but it is full of rich and meaningful social information,” said study lead author Miriam Lense, PhD, assistant professor

of Otolaryngology and co-director of the Music Cognition Lab at VUMC. “Here we show that when caregivers sing to their infants, they are intuitively structuring their behavior to support the caregiver-infant social bond and infant social learning.”

 

During testing, researchers used eye-tracking technology to measure every movement of each infant’s eyes while they watched videos of people engaging them with song. 

 

“For this study, we used videos of singing rather than live singing to ensure that any change in infant looking behavior was due to the infant, and not the singer adjusting to the infant,” Lense said. “Infants could look anywhere while watching the videos but we found that their looking behavior was not random.”

 

“Critically, the predictable rhythm of singing is essential for this entrained social interaction. When we experimentally manipulate the singing so that it no longer has a predictable rhythm, entrainment is disrupted and infants no longer successfully synchronize their eye-looking to the caregivers’ social cues,” she added.

 

Researchers confirmed their findings in a different group of 6-month-old infants who watched both the original videos of singing, as well as videos that had been manipulated to be jittered so that their rhythms were no longer predictable. 

 

While the infants again displayed entrained eye-looking to the original videos when the singing was rhythmically predictable, this time-locked eye-looking effect was no longer present when the predictable rhythm had been disrupted. 

 

“This is important because it reveals a remarkable physical coupling between caregiver behavior and infant experience,” said Warren Jones, PhD, the study’s senior author and Nien Distinguished Chair in Autism at Emory University School of Medicine. “Without conscious awareness, something as simple and intuitive as caregiver singing sets in motion a whole cascade of behaviors that alters infants’ experiences.”

 

“Although what a caregiver expresses is important, when and how they express social cues is particularly critical for infant-caregiver communication,” Lense added. “Rhythmic predictability – a universal feature of song – is an integral mechanism for structuring social interactions and supporting infant social development.”

 

Reyna Gordon, PhD, associate professor of Otolaryngology and co-director of the Music Cognition Lab at VUMC, said the study underscores that making music is not only about entertainment: making music is a core aspect of early socio-emotional development.

 

“It is remarkable that these infants are basically tracking the beat of music with their eyes by modulating their eye contact with the singer’s eyes around the beat (or pulse) of singing,” said Gordon, who was not involved in the study. 

 

“These findings represent a major step forward in our understanding of the extent that very young children are sensitive to musical rhythm, suggesting that innateness for music is intertwined with early social engagement,” she added. 

 

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Mental Health, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, National Institute for Deafness and Communication Disorders) and the GRAMMY Foundation.

 

Lense said her team has now extended the research to study synchronization in autism as part of the Sound Health Initiative, a partnership between the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in association with the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

 

 

 

---

JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

ARTICLE TITLE

Music of Infant-Directed Singing Entrains Infants' Social Visual Behavior

Access to media amplifies negative effects of terrorism on school enrolment in Kenya

Media coverage of terrorist attacks significantly raises fear amongst families and leads to children being kept out of schools in Kenya, new research reveals.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

LANCASTER UNIVERSITY

Media coverage of terrorist attacks significantly raises fear amongst families and leads to children being kept out of schools in Kenya, new research reveals.

Kenyan families with access to radio, mobile phones or TV are found to be significantly more afraid of terrorism and are less likely to send their children to school.

The new study by Lancaster University Management School and Bocconi University in Italy, published in the Journal of the European Economic Association, finds that Kenyan parents with access to mass media believe that the risk of dying in a terrorist attack is 12 times larger than actual rates. As a result, these parents are more likely to keep their children out of school.

Comparing school enrolment rates over time, the study finds that the negative effect of terrorist attacks on school enrolment is twice as large for children with access to mass media, than for children without.

“Terrorism differs from other types of violence such as war or gun crime, in that it results in relatively low casualty numbers and causes minimal damage to infrastructure,” co-author Dr Marco Alfano from Lancaster University Management School explains. “Nevertheless, terrorism can severely affect economies by heightening fears.

“Our data shows that while al-Shabaab rarely targets educational institutions, their attacks decrease school enrolments substantially in Kenya. Crucially, results show that this negative effect doubles in size if parents have access to mass media, such as the radio, for instance. This suggests that media coverage plays a crucial role in stoking fears and keeping children out of school.”

Researchers say that families without media access react predominantly to attacks close to their homes, whereas families with access to media keep their children out of school in response to terrorist attacks happening more than 100km away.

“This loss of education is significant,” co-author Dr Joseph-Simon Görlach from Bocconi University adds. “The decline in school enrolment leads to decreased earnings later on in life when compared to peers in areas with no terrorist attacks. We find media coverage of terrorist events reduces children’s earnings in later life by around 25% of a year’s income.”

The study saw researchers use geo-coded data on wireless signal strength for radio and television and the staggered rollout of mobile phone coverage to study the effect of exposure to mass media from both a geographical and chronological point of view.

They analysed the geographical concentration of terrorist attacks using precise information from the Global Terrorism Database and, by studying the chronology of attacks over a long period of time, the authors were able to identify variation and trends in the data. They then used three independent data sources on school attendance and enrolment in Kenya (the Hunger Safety Net Program and the 2009 and 2014 rounds of country-wide Demographic Health Survey, and county level administrative data) along with Afrobarometer for data capturing public attitudes as part of the study. In assessing trends from these multiple sources, then overlaying the geographical coordinates of respondents’ homes in relation to radio signal coverage and mobile network data, the authors were able to show that each terrorist attack decreases school enrolment by around 0.4-0.5 percentage points for households without media access. For households with wireless signal coverage for radio, telephone or television, the effect is a statistically significant 0.5-0.7 percentage points stronger.

“This study should be useful for Kenyan Government and other similar nations that are pouring incredible resource and finances into incentives to boost school attendance and the quality of education for young people,” Dr Alfano continues. “Our results show that access to media has significantly increased fear of terrorism in the country and this has a significant ripple-effect which is impacting younger generations who are being kept out of school and suffer financially later in life.  

“Our results could serve as a caution against sensationalism and in favour of moderate and fact-oriented reporting of terrorist events. Providing children with fast, reliable and secure transport to school may also mitigate some of these negative effects. These changes would likely make a considerable difference to children’s education and Kenya’s long-term growth and development.”

The paper, Terrorism, media coverage and education: Evidence from al-Shabaab attacks in Kenya, is published in the Journal of the European Economic Association.

https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvac054

ENDS

---

JOURNAL

Journal of the European Economic Association

DOI

10.1093/jeea/jvac054 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Terrorism, media coverage and education: Evidence from al-Shabaab attacks in Kenya

Volcanic activity and low ocean oxygen events linked to climate warming and rapid ice melt during last ice age, study finds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

CORVALLIS, Ore. –  A chemical analysis of sediment cores from the North Pacific Ocean show a consistent pairing of volcanic ash and hypoxia, a low ocean oxygen interval spanning thousands of years, during times of rapid climate warming at the end of the last ice age, new research shows.

Understanding the relationship between volcanic activity, hypoxia and ice melt due to warming temperatures during the last ice age, which ended about 18,000 years ago, raises important questions about what might occur as the planet warms today.

“It is unknown right now whether volcanic eruptions will increase as the climate warms,” said the study’s lead author, Jianghui Du of ETH Zurich in Switzerland, who conducted the research as a doctoral student at Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.

“But we know that the remaining glaciers on volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean ring of fire are melting fast, and it will be important to include this ice loss in predictions of future eruptions, which would be risky for populated regions and could also make emerging hypoxic dead zones in the North Pacific worse.”

The study was published today in the journal Nature. The findings point to a systematic relationship between climate, glacier retreat, volcanic activity, biological productivity and deoxygenation of the ocean, said Alan Mix, an oceanographer and paleoclimatologist at Oregon State and a co-author of the paper.

“These surprising linkages between parts of the Earth we usually think of as separate highlight how interconnected the whole system really is,” he said. “Solving environmental problems, such as those we face in the ongoing climate crisis, demands that we look with open minds at the whole linked system and not just at isolated parts.”

The volcanic region in the Pacific Ocean is known as the ring of fire in part because it is one of the most active tectonic and volcanic regions of the world.

The timing of volcanic events in relation to the retreat of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which once covered large portions of western North America, suggests that the rapid melting of ice covering volcanoes in the region induced increased volcanic activity, Mix said.

“Ice cover to volcanoes is like a cork in a champagne bottle. Remove the icy cork and boom, the eruptions begin,” he said.

Past research had shown a few ash layers in sediment in the region, but Du’s chemical study, using deep-sea sediment cores from the Gulf of Alaska, revealed more traces of ash that were not visible to the eye.

Du catalogued and compared volcanic eruptions from areas that were covered in ice against those areas that were not ice-covered during the last ice age.

“We found a distinct pattern of many eruptions during warming and ice retreat in the areas where glaciers were present, and much less change in the frequency of eruptions outside the ice-covered zone, particularly in western North America,” Du said. “That provides strong evidence for the volcanic response to warming and ice retreat.”

The chemical fingerprints also showed a consistent pairing of volcanic ash and hypoxic events. The increase in volcanic ash likely fueled ocean productivity that ultimately created low-oxygen conditions.

Co-authors from Texas A&M University, Christina Belanger and Sharon, who uses only one name, examined a species of seafloor organisms called foraminifera and found that they closely tracked the volcanic ash input from the Gulf of Alaska. These organisms thrive under highly productive waters and can tolerate low oxygen conditions.

“Volcanic ash includes important trace nutrients for plankton, especially iron,” said co-author Brian Haley, a research professor at Oregon State.

“When the ash hits the ocean, the plant plankton gobble up that iron and bloom. This fertilization effect underscores a practical application of our work. Some have proposed fertilizing the North Pacific with iron to capture excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” he said. “We show that the real world has effectively run that experiment in the past with volcanic iron, and the fertilization effect works and exports carbon to the deep sea. That’s good news. But there are some dangerous consequences because when that excess organic matter decomposes as it falls to the ocean depths, it consumes oxygen and creates dead zones.”

---

JOURNAL

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-022-05267-y 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Volcanic trigger of ocean deoxygenation during Cordilleran ice sheet retreat

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Nov-2022

Do you speak extra-terrestrial?

New research hub considers response to life beyond Earth

Business Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS

 

IMAGE: IMAGE SHOWS ST ANDREWS SETI POST-DETECTION HUB TEAM, FROM LEFT: DEREK BALL, EMILY FINER, MARTIN DOMINIK, JOHN ELLIOTT, EMMA JOHANNA PURANEN, AND ADAM BOWER view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE

What does humanity do when we discover we are not alone in the cosmos? A new international research hub at the University of St Andrews will coordinate global expertise to prepare humanity for such an event and how we should respond.

While we might never learn about the existence of life beyond Earth, or even about another intelligent civilisation, there’s a chance it could be detected sooner rather than later. But are we prepared? 

The new SETI Post-Detection Hub, hosted by the Centre for Exoplanet Science and the Centre for Global Law and Governance of the University of St Andrews, will act as a coordinating centre for an international effort bringing together diverse expertise across both the sciences and the humanities for setting out impact assessments, protocols, procedures, and treaties designed to enable a responsible response. 

Dr John Elliott, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science of the University of St Andrews and coordinator of the Hub, said: “Science fiction is awash with explorations of the impact on human society following discovery of, and even encounters with, life or intelligence elsewhere. 

“But we need to go beyond thinking about the impact on humanity. We need to coordinate our expert knowledge not only for assessing the evidence but also for considering the human social response, as our understanding progresses and what we know and what we don’t know is communicated. And the time to do this is now.

“Scanning signals of assumed extra-terrestrial origin for structures of language and attaching meaning is an elaborate and time-consuming process during which our knowledge will be advanced in many steps as we learn ‘Extra-Terrestrial’.”

The SETI Post-Detection Hub will close a substantial policy gap and will also consider responsible science communication in the social media era.

Limited attention has been given to the topic, a rare exception being the Royal Society holding a Scientific Discussion Meeting on ‘The detection of extra-terrestrial life and the consequences for science and society’ in 2010, after which the then-Director of the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), Mazlan Othman, had to debunk the emerging news story of her having been appointed as ‘alien ambassador’.

There are now procedures and entities established with the United Nations for dealing with the threat posed by impacts of asteroids on Earth, but there is nothing similar in place for picking up a radio signal from E.T. 

Currently, the only existing agreed ‘contact’ protocols are those drawn up by the SETI community itself in 1989, which were last revised in 2010. Focusing entirely on general scientific conduct, they constitute non-enforceable aspirations and fall short of being useful for managing in practice the full process of searching, handling candidate evidence, confirmation of detections, post-detection analysis and interpretation, and potential response.

The SETI Post-Detection Hub for the first time provides a permanent ‘home’ for coordinating the development of a fully comprehensive framework, drawing together interested members of the SETI and wider academic communities as well as policy experts to work on topics ranging from message decipherment and data analytics to the development of regulatory protocols, space law, and societal impact strategies.

Dr Elliott said: “Will we ever get a message from E.T.? We don’t know. We also don’t know when this is going to happen. But we do know that we cannot afford to be ill prepared – scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless – for an event that could turn into reality as early as tomorrow and which we cannot afford to mismanage.”

Vaccine uptake remains low among at-risk Canadians

As the flu season begins and the COVID-19 pandemic continues, pneumococcal vaccination is more important than ever, say researchers

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MCGILL UNIVERSITY

As the flu season begins and the COVID-19 pandemic continues, pneumococcal vaccination is more important than ever to prevent disease and death from pneumonia and other forms of pneumococcal disease. But vaccine uptake remains low among adults at high risk, say researchers from McGill University.

Q&A with Giorgia Sulis, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health

What is pneumococcal disease?

Pneumococcus is the leading bacterial cause of pneumonia and can cause other serious infections, including sepsis and meningitis. Pneumonia is among the top 10 causes of death among adults in Canada. Most cases of pneumococcal disease are vaccine preventable.

What question did you set out to answer?

Understanding vaccine uptake and the factors associated with non-vaccination has important implications for reducing the risk of pneumococcal disease and can save lives. To find answers, our study analyzed self-reported data of pneumococcal vaccine uptake from 33,061 Canadian community-dwelling adults enrolled in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA). Specifically, we examined two key groups at high risk: older adults (i.e. those aged 65 or older) and adults aged 47-64 who had underlying chronic medical conditions.

What did you find?

While most cases of pneumococcal disease are vaccine-preventable, pneumococcal vaccine uptake remains low among those at high risk, particularly among adults aged 65 and older and adults with an underlying chronic health condition. We found that about half of those aged 65 and older, and over 80% of those aged 47 to 64 who had an underlying chronic condition reported never receiving a pneumococcal vaccine in their lifetime. While the proportion of non-vaccinated adults was lower among those who got the flu shot or had contact with a family doctor in the previous year, many people missed opportunities for vaccination. This contrasts sharply with the 80% vaccination coverage target set by the Canadian National Immunization Strategy, to be achieved by 2025.

What is the significance of these findings?

Our study is the largest analysis of pneumococcal vaccine uptake and factors associated with non-vaccination among high-risk adults in Canada. It also sheds new light on the problem of missed opportunities for vaccination. We hope that our study can contribute to raise awareness about this problem and promote effective strategies aimed at increasing pneumococcal vaccine uptake to reduce hospitalizations and mortality.

About this study

“Pneumococcal vaccination uptake and missed opportunities for vaccination among Canadian adults: A cross-sectional analysis of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA)” by Giorgia Sulis et al. was published in PLOS ONE.

---

JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0275923 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Pneumococcal vaccination uptake and missed opportunities for vaccination among Canadian adults: A cross-sectional analysis of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA)