Monday, February 29, 2016

Mysterious Chimpanzee Behavior May Be Evidence of "Sacred" Rituals

Videos from Africa capture repeated activities unconnected to food or status

I trampled clumsily through the dense undergrowth, attempting in vain to go a full five minutes without getting snarled in the thorns that threatened my every move. It was my first field mission in the savannahs of the Republic of Guinea. The aim was to record and understand a group of wild chimpanzees who had never been studied before. These chimps are not lucky enough to enjoy the comforts of a protected area, but instead carve out their existence in the patches of forests between farms and villages.
We paused at a clearing in the bush. I let out a sigh of relief that no thorns appeared to be within reach, but why had we stopped? I made my way to the front of the group to ask the chief of the village and our legendary guide, Mamadou Alioh Bah. He told me he had found something interesting—some innocuous markings on a tree trunk. Something that most of us wouldn’t have even noticed in the complex and messy environment of a savannah had stopped him in his tracks. Some in our group of six suggested that wild pigs had made these marks, while scratching up against the tree trunk, others suggested it was teenagers messing around.
But Alioh had a hunch—and when a man that can find a single fallen chimp hair on the forest floor and can spot chimps kilometres away with his naked eye better than you can (with expensive binoculars) as a hunch, you listen to that hunch. We set up a camera trap in the hope that whatever made these marks would come back and do it again, but this time we would catch it all on film.

A world first

Camera traps automatically start recording when any movement occurs in front of them. For this reason they are an ideal tool for recording wildlife doing its own thing without any disturbance. I made notes to return to the same spot in two weeks (as that’s roughly how long the batteries last) and we moved on, back into the wilderness.
Whenever you return to a camera trap there is always a sense of excitement in the air of the mysteries that it could hold—despite the fact that most of our videos consisted of branches swaying in strong winds or wandering farmers’ cows enthusiastically licking the camera lens, there is an uncontrollable anticipation that maybe something amazing has been captured.
What we saw on this camera was exhilarating—a large male chimp approaches our mystery tree and pauses for a second. He then quickly glances around, grabs a huge rock and flings it full force at the tree trunk.

Nothing like this had been seen before and it gave me goose bumps. Jane Goodall first discovered wild chimps using tools in the 1960s. Chimps use twigs, leaves, sticks and some groups even use spears in order to get food. Stones have also been used by chimps to crack open nuts and cut open large fruit. Occasionally, chimps throw rocks in displays of strength to establish their position in a community.
But what we discovered during our now-published study wasn’t a random, one-off event, it was a repeated activity with no clear link to gaining food or status—it could be a ritual. We searched the area and found many more sites where trees had similar markings and in many places piles of rocks had accumulated inside hollow tree trunks—reminiscent of the piles of rocks archaeologists have uncovered in human history.
Videos poured in. Other groups working in our project began searching for trees with tell-tale markings. We found the same mysterious behaviour in small pockets of Guinea Bissau, Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire but nothing east of this, despite searching across the entire chimp range from the western coasts of Guinea all the way to Tanzania.

Sacred trees

I spent many months in the field, along with many other researchers, trying to figure out what these chimps are up to. So far we have two main theories. The behaviour could be part of a male display, where the loud bang made when a rock hits a hollow tree adds to the impressive nature of a display. This could be especially likely in areas where there are not many trees with large roots that chimps would normally drum on with their powerful hands and feet. If some trees produce an impressive bang, this could accompany or replace feet drumming in a display and trees with particularly good acoustics could become popular spots for revisits.
On the other hand, it could be more symbolic than that—and more reminiscent of our own past. Marking pathways and territories with signposts such as piles of rocks is an important step in human history. Figuring out where chimps' territories are in relation to rock throwing sites could give us insights into whether this is the case here.
Even more intriguing than this, maybe we found the first evidence of chimpanzees creating a kind of shrine that could indicate sacred trees. Indigenous West African people have stone collections at “sacred” trees and such man-made stone collections are commonly observed across the world and look eerily similar to what we have discovered here.

A vanishing world

To unravel the mysteries of our closest living relatives, we must make space for them in the wild. In the Ivory Coast alone, chimpanzee populations have decreased by more than 90% in the past 17 years.
A devastating combination of increasing human numbers, habitat destruction, poaching and infectious disease severely endangers chimpanzees. Leading sncientists warn us that, if nothing changes, chimps and other great apes will have only 30 years left in the wild. In the unprotected forests of Guinea, where we first discovered this enigmatic behaviour, rapid deforestation is rendering the area close to uninhabitable for the chimps that once lived and thrived there. Allowing chimpanzees in the wild to continue spiralling towards extinction will not only be a critical loss to biodiversity, but a tragic loss to our own heritage, too.
You can support chimps with your time, by instantly becoming a citizen scientist and spying on them at www.chimpandsee.org, and with your wallet by donating to the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation. Who knows what we might find next that could forever change our understanding of our closest relatives.
Laura Kehoe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Ocean acidification already slowing coral reef growth

Science News

from research organizations

Ocean acidification already slowing coral reef growth

Date:

February 24, 2016

Source:

Carnegie Institution

Summary:

A team of scientists performed the first-ever experiment that manipulated seawater chemistry in a natural coral reef community in order to determine the effect that excess carbon dioxide released by human activity is having on coral reefs. Their results provide evidence that ocean acidification is already slowing coral reef growth.

Doing fieldwork at One Tree Island in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, a team led by Carnegie's Ken Caldeira pumps alkalinity across a reef flat to measure the effects on community calcification. Caldeira has done extensive work at One Tree Island, where he studies ocean acidification, marine biogeochemisty, and chemical oceanography, all related to reef decline and the perilous situation of the world's coral reefs today. Reefs are havens for marine biodiversity and underpin the economies of many coastal communities. But they are at risk thanks to changes in ocean chemistry due to greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, warming waters, overdevelopment, and overfishing.

Credit: Lester Kwiatkowski.

A team of scientists led by Carnegie's Rebecca Albright and Ken Caldeira performed the first-ever experiment that manipulated seawater chemistry in a natural coral reef community in order to determine the effect that excess carbon dioxide released by human activity is having on coral reefs. Their results provide evidence that ocean acidification is already slowing coral reef growth. Their work is published in Nature.

When we burn coal, oil, or gas, the resulting carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere where it acts as a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases emitted by human activity don't just affect the atmosphere; they also have a negative impact on the world's oceans. This is partially due to overall warming caused by climate change. But also, over time, most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by the ocean, where it reacts with seawater to form an acid that is corrosive to coral reefs, shellfish, and other marine life. This process is known as 'ocean acidification'.
Coral reefs are particularly vulnerable to the ocean acidification process, because reef architecture is built by the accretion of calcium carbonate, called calcification, which becomes increasingly difficult as acid concentrations increase and the surrounding water's pH decreases. Scientists predict that reefs could switch from carbonate accretion to dissolution within the century due to this acidification process.
Previous studies have demonstrated large-scale declines in coral reefs over recent decades. Work from another team led by Caldeira found that rates of reef calcification were 40 percent lower in 2008 and 2009 than they were during the same season in 1975 and 1976. But it has been hard to pinpoint exactly how much of the decline is due to acidification and how much is caused by warming, pollution, and over-fishing.
The team manipulated the alkalinity of seawater flowing over a reef flat off Australia's One Tree Island in the southern Great Barrier Reef. They brought the reef's pH closer to what it would have been in the pre-industrial period based on estimates of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the era. They then measured the reef's calcification in response to this pH increase. They found that calcification rates under these manipulated pre-industrial conditions were higher than they are today.
"Our work provides the first strong evidence from experiments on a natural ecosystem that ocean acidification is already slowing coral reef growth," Albright said. "Ocean acidification is already taking its toll on coral reef communities. This is no longer a fear for the future; it is the reality of today."
Increasing the alkalinity of ocean water around coral reefs has been proposed as a geoengineering measure to save shallow marine ecosystems. These results show that this idea could be effective. However, the practicality of implementing such measures would be almost impossible at all but the smallest scales.
"The only real, lasting way to protect coral reefs is to make deep cuts in our carbon dioxide emissions," Caldeira said. "If we don't take action on this issue very rapidly, coral reefs--and everything that depends on them, including both wildlife and local communities--will not survive into the next century."
Albright will be presenting this research Monday Feb. 22 at the 2016 Ocean Sciences Meeting co-sponsored by the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, The Oceanography Society and the American Geophysical Union.
Other members of the team include: Carnegie's Lilian Caldeira, Lester Kwiatkowski, Jana Maclaren (also of Stanford University), Yana Nebuchina, Julia Pongratz (now at Max Planck Institute for Meteorology), Katharine Ricke, Kenny Schneider (now at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Marine Sesboue, and Kai Zhu (now at RiceUniversity); as well as Jessica Hosfelt and Aaron Ninokawa of University of California Davis, Benjamin Mason of Stanford University, Tanya Rivlin of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Kathryn Shamberger of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Texas A&M University, and Kennedy Wolfe of The University Sydney.
This work was supported by the Carnegie Institution for Science and the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research.

Story Source:
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Carnegie Institution. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:

Rebecca Albright, Lilian Caldeira, Jessica Hosfelt, Lester Kwiatkowski, Jana K. Maclaren, Benjamin M. Mason, Yana Nebuchina, Aaron Ninokawa, Julia Pongratz, Katharine L. Ricke, Tanya Rivlin, Kenneth Schneider, Marine Sesboüé, Kathryn Shamberger, Jacob Silverman, Kennedy Wolfe, Kai Zhu, Ken Caldeira. Reversal of ocean acidification enhances net coral reef calcification. Nature, 2016; DOI: 10.1038/nature17155

Magnetoreception molecule found in the eyes of dogs, primates

Science News

from research organizations

Magnetoreception molecule found in the eyes of dogs, primates

Dog-like carnivores, some primate species may have a magnetic compass similar to that of birds

Date:: February 25, 2016
Source:: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Summary:: The magnetic sense in migratory birds has been studied in considerable detail: unlike a boy scout's compass, which shows the compass direction, a bird's compass recognizes the inclination of the magnetic field lines relative to Earth's surface. Now scientists report that dog-like carnivores and some primate species may have a magnetic compass similar to that of birds.; The perception of Earth's magnetic field is used by many animal species for orientation and navigation. A magnetic sense is found in some insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, whereas humans do not appear to be able to perceive Earth's magnetic field.
The magnetic sense in migratory birds has been studied in considerable detail: unlike a boy scout's compass, which shows the compass direction, a bird's compass recognizes the inclination of the magnetic field lines relative to Earth's surface. Surprisingly, this inclination compass in birds is linked to the visual system as the magnetic field activates the light-sensitive molecule cryptochrome 1a in the retina of the bird's eye. Cryptochrome 1a is located in the blue- to UV-sensitive cone photoreceptors and only reacts to the magnetic field if it is simultaneously excited by light.
Cryptochrome-distribution among mammals
Together with colleagues from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, the Goethe University Frankfurt, and the Universities of Duisburg-Essen and Göttingen, Christine Nießner and Leo Peichl from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt investigated the presence of cryptochrome 1 in the retinas of 90 species of mammal. Mammalian cryptochrome 1 is the equivalent of bird cryptochrome 1a. With the help of antibodies against the light-activated form of the molecule, the scientists found cryptochrome 1 only in a few species from the carnivore and primate groups. As is the case in birds, it is found in the blue-sensitive cones in these animals. The molecule is present in dog-like carnivores such as dogs, wolves, bears, foxes and badgers, but is not found in cat-like carnivores such as cats, lions and tigers. Among the primates, cryptochrome 1 is found in the orang-utan, for example. In all tested species of the other 16 mammalian orders, the researchers found no active cryptochrome 1 in the cone cells of the retina.
The active cryptochrome 1 is found in the light-sensitive outer segments of the cone cells. It is therefore unlikely that it controls the animals' circadian rhythms from there, as this control occurs in the cell nucleus which is located a considerable distance away. It is also unlikely that cryptochrome 1 acts as an additional visual pigment for colour perception. The researchers thus suspect that some mammals may use the cryptochrome 1 to perceive Earth's magnetic field. In evolutionary terms, the blue cones in mammals correspond to the blue-to UV-sensitive cones in birds. It is therefore entirely possible that the cryptochrome 1 in mammals has a comparable function.
Observations of foxes, dogs and even humans actually indicate that they can perceive Earth's magnetic field. For example, foxes are more successful at catching mice when they pounce on them in a north-east direction. "Nevertheless, we were very surprised to find active cryptochrome 1 in the cone cells of only two mammalian groups, as species whose cones do not contain active cryptochrome 1, for example some rodents and bats, also react to the magnetic field," says Christine Nießner.
Particle-based magnetic compass
One possible explanation for this is that animals can also perceive the magnetic field in a different way: for example, with the help of magnetite, microscopic ferrous particles in cells. A magnetite-based magnetic sense functions like a pocket compass and does not require any light. Mole rats, which live in lightless tunnel systems, orient using this kind of compass. Birds also have an additional orientation mechanism based on magnetite, which they use to determine their position.
Many fundamental questions remain open in the research on the magnetic sense. Future studies will have to reveal whether the cryptochrome 1 in the blue cones is also part of a magnetic sense in mammals or whether it fulfils other tasks in the retina.; Cryptochromes are light-sensitive molecules that exist in bacteria, plants and animals. In animals, they are involved in the control of the body's circadian rhythms. In birds, cryptochromes are also involved in the light-dependent magnetic orientation response based on Earth's magnetic field: cryptochrome 1a is located in photoreceptors in birds' eyes and is activated by the magnetic field. Now researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt have also detected cryptochrome 1 in photoreceptors in several mammalian species. Therefore, it is possible that these animals also have a magnetic sense that is linked to their visual system.

The perception of Earth's magnetic field is used by many animal species for orientation and navigation. A magnetic sense is found in some insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, whereas humans do not appear to be able to perceive Earth's magnetic field.
The magnetic sense in migratory birds has been studied in considerable detail: unlike a boy scout's compass, which shows the compass direction, a bird's compass recognizes the inclination of the magnetic field lines relative to Earth's surface. Surprisingly, this inclination compass in birds is linked to the visual system as the magnetic field activates the light-sensitive molecule cryptochrome 1a in the retina of the bird's eye. Cryptochrome 1a is located in the blue- to UV-sensitive cone photoreceptors and only reacts to the magnetic field if it is simultaneously excited by light.
Cryptochrome-distribution among mammals
Together with colleagues from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, the Goethe University Frankfurt, and the Universities of Duisburg-Essen and Göttingen, Christine Nießner and Leo Peichl from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt investigated the presence of cryptochrome 1 in the retinas of 90 species of mammal. Mammalian cryptochrome 1 is the equivalent of bird cryptochrome 1a. With the help of antibodies against the light-activated form of the molecule, the scientists found cryptochrome 1 only in a few species from the carnivore and primate groups. As is the case in birds, it is found in the blue-sensitive cones in these animals. The molecule is present in dog-like carnivores such as dogs, wolves, bears, foxes and badgers, but is not found in cat-like carnivores such as cats, lions and tigers. Among the primates, cryptochrome 1 is found in the orang-utan, for example. In all tested species of the other 16 mammalian orders, the researchers found no active cryptochrome 1 in the cone cells of the retina.
The active cryptochrome 1 is found in the light-sensitive outer segments of the cone cells. It is therefore unlikely that it controls the animals' circadian rhythms from there, as this control occurs in the cell nucleus which is located a considerable distance away. It is also unlikely that cryptochrome 1 acts as an additional visual pigment for colour perception. The researchers thus suspect that some mammals may use the cryptochrome 1 to perceive Earth's magnetic field. In evolutionary terms, the blue cones in mammals correspond to the blue-to UV-sensitive cones in birds. It is therefore entirely possible that the cryptochrome 1 in mammals has a comparable function.
Observations of foxes, dogs and even humans actually indicate that they can perceive Earth's magnetic field. For example, foxes are more successful at catching mice when they pounce on them in a north-east direction. "Nevertheless, we were very surprised to find active cryptochrome 1 in the cone cells of only two mammalian groups, as species whose cones do not contain active cryptochrome 1, for example some rodents and bats, also react to the magnetic field," says Christine Nießner.
Particle-based magnetic compass
One possible explanation for this is that animals can also perceive the magnetic field in a different way: for example, with the help of magnetite, microscopic ferrous particles in cells. A magnetite-based magnetic sense functions like a pocket compass and does not require any light. Mole rats, which live in lightless tunnel systems, orient using this kind of compass. Birds also have an additional orientation mechanism based on magnetite, which they use to determine their position.
Many fundamental questions remain open in the research on the magnetic sense. Future studies will have to reveal whether the cryptochrome 1 in the blue cones is also part of a magnetic sense in mammals or whether it fulfils other tasks in the retina.

Did Global Warming Slow Down in the 2000s, or Not?

Scientists clarify the recent confusion

The global warming “hiatus,” a controversy that spawned congressional hearings and thousands of skeptical blog posts before being curbed last year, is back.
The “hiatus” refers to the observation that global warming has slowed in the past 15 years. The planet is still warming, but just not as quickly as some climate scientists expected it to.
The debate between researchers and doubters reached a crescendo last summer, when scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration updated their temperature records and concluded that global warming has not slowed down in the 2000s (ClimateWire, June 5, 2015).
Now, a group of prominent climate scientists are challenging NOAA’s conclusion in a commentary published this week in Nature Climate Change.

This graph shows a “slowdown” in rising temperatures until 2010. The black line shows temperatures as predicted by climate models, and the red line shows actual temperatures. Warming has recently increased, breaking historical records in 2014 and 2015.
*Nature Climate Change, February 24, 2016 doi:10.1038/nclimate2938*

“The interpretation [the NOAA group] made was not valid,” said John Fyfe, a climate scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada and lead author of the commentary. “The slowdown is there, even in this new updated data set.”The disagreement may seem esoteric, but it underpins the biggest climate disagreement of the past decades. Climate models, which are virtual representations of our planet, project that temperatures were much higher in the early 2000s than was the case in reality. Scientists have been trying to understand why.
Suggestions abound, from cooling aerosols spewed by volcanic eruptions to natural shifts in the Pacific Ocean that happen every decade.
Meanwhile, skeptics have seized on the mismatch to suggest that global warming stopped in 1998. Almost all scientists disagree with this. But there are questions about the rate of warming. Most recently, the NOAA study suggested that rising temperatures never even slowed.

Not worried about fueling skepticism

The NOAA study’s release last summer coincided with a science meeting in Colorado where scientists were discussing how to engineer models to accurately predict climate changes in the coming decades on a regional scale. To do so, they would first have to figure out why models had not projected the global warming slowdown.
With the NOAA study’s release, there was this perception that, “Oh, there’s been no slowdown in warming,” said Gerald Meehl, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a co-author of the new commentary.
The scientists decided to counter the narrative in the boxing ring of academia. That is, a science journal.
It is possible that the scientific disagreement could spill over into the skeptic blogosphere. But that is not reason enough to sweep the slowdown under the rug, said Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University and a co-author.
“As scientists, we must go where the evidence takes us, we can’t allow our worries about climate contrarians and how they might seek to misrepresent our work to dictate what we do and do not publish,” he said.
The blowback against the NOAA study has been some time coming. Tom Karl, lead author of the NOAA study and director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, and his colleagues compared warming over the past 15 years with the long-term temperature trend between 1950 and 1998 (a 48-year stretch).
But scientists say Karl’s comparison of a 15-year stretch with a 48-year stretch was somewhat arbitrary. It is meant to answer the question, has global warming stopped in the long run? The answer to that is a resounding “no,” they say.
Scientists are more interested in explaining fluctuations in global temperatures over 10- and 20-year stretches. Throughout Earth’s history, global temperatures have risen and fallen in step with natural fluctuations in the climate system that scientists are only just beginning to unravel.
Karl said that understanding this decadeslong variability is important, and his study had dealt with the long-term trend.
“There is no disagreement that there is decadal variability, and that it is real and needs to be better understood,” he said, referring to natural causes of warming.

Models ‘not perfect’

One decadal variability played out recently, when warming slowed to 0.11 degrees Celsius per decade between 2001 and 2010. The rate was 0.17 C per decade in the 15 years prior, Fyfe said.
Fyfe and his colleagues think the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), a natural variance in the climate system that switches between positive, neutral and negative phases, explains the recent slowdown.
When ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific are warmer than usual—a positive PDO—the globe sizzles, Meehl of NCAR said.
And when the PDO flips to negative and the Pacific cools, global warming slows. The PDO was negative during the early-2000s, and this may explain the slowdown, Meehl said.
The only time the PDO was neutral in recent history was between 1971 and 2000, Fyfe said. In that case, the temperature record reflects the response to human-caused climate change, he said.
“This is the background trend that you would want to compare recent trends against,” he said.
There are other explanations for the slowdown and also for why climate models did not project it. It is possible that the world is not as sensitive to greenhouse gases as the models assume or factors that cool the planet are playing a bigger role than expected, Fyfe said.
“These models are not perfect, and they might be overly sensitive,” he said.
Answering these fundamental science questions should take precedence over worries about skeptics, Mann of Penn State said. Moreover, the slowdown is over. Record warmth occurred in 2014 and 2015.
“So we have every reason to believe that the warming of the planet and the detrimental impacts of that warming will continue unabated if we do not dramatically reduce our emissions,” Mann said.
Read More: Global Warming "Hiatus" Debate Flares Up Again
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment &

Global biodiversity report warns pollinators are under threat

First assessment from intergovernmental body set up to track world's ecosystems suggests curbing pesticide use to save bees.

An international science body tasked with tracking the ecological health of the planet has announced the findings of its first report. The review warns that the ongoing decline in the number of pollinating insects and animals threatens global crop production.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was established in 2012, and is roughly modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The reponse to the pollinator report, announced on 26 February at a meeting in Kuala Lumpur, may be an early sign of whether the body's influence will one day match the IPCC's political and scientific clout.
Robert Watson, an environmental scientist at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, who is vice-chairman of the IPBES, says that he is confident that the assessment will have an impact. The IPBES has 124 member governments, and its pollinator assessment went through two rounds of external peer review. And just as with the IPCC’s climate reports, the assessment was debated word for word, Watson says. “The fact that all governments requested this document really bodes well that they will use the results,” he says.
But Dave Goulson, a bee researcher at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, says: “I would question whether any practical on-the-ground action to help pollinators will happen as a result of this document. We are in the midst of the sixth global mass-extinction event, and we sit around spending thousands of hours writing documents about biodiversity, but we do not take action to address the fundamental issues that are causing this ecological catastrophe.”

Pollinator warning

The report offers a sober assessment of the decline in populations of pollinating insects and animals, affected by factors including climate change, disease and pesticide use. The global production of crops that depend on pollinators is an industry worth up to US$577 billion annually, the report says.
“If we get further declines in wild and managed pollinators, it would be a serious risk to foods that rely on those pollinators, especially food of high nutritional quality such as seeds and fruits,” says Watson.
It is “becoming very clear” that pesticides have “definite harmful effects” on wild bees, says Simon Potts, a biodiversity scientist at the University of Reading, UK, and co-chair of the report. “There needs to be less application and smart application” of such chemicals, he adds.
Studies have yielded mixed results on the link between pesticides and declining bee health, the IPBES assessment notes. Critics have questioned some studies for using doses that are much higher than those typically found in pesticide residues on farmers’ fields, and also ask whether sub-lethal effects seen in individual insects are relevant to whole populations.
The review acknowledges these limitations, but it says that some lab studies do use realistic doses. The harmful effects seen on individual bees in one recent field-based study¹ are “so huge and so strong”, adds Potts, that it indicates that effects on populations and colonies will likely be negative. The next step is to get direct evidence of long-term population effects, he says.
“Exposure of pollinators to pesticides can be decreased by reducing the use of pesticides,” the report says, and by using other forms of pest control. It also suggests that farmers could adopt ecologically friendly farming techniques, such as planting strips of flowers to boost pollinating insect numbers.
In 2013, the European Commission imposed a temporary ban on the use of three controversial ‘neonicotinoid’ insecticides — clothianidin, thiamethoxam and imidacloprid. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in Parma, Italy, is reviewing their safety and expects to complete its analysis by January 2017.

IPBES controversy

The IPBES assessment attracted controversy before its release: some scientists complained of a lack of transparency in the appointment of two agrochemical scientists among 40 lead authors involved in the review. Axel Hochkirch, a biodiversity scientist at the University of Trier, Germany, says that he is still concerned about how the scientists from industry were selected, even though the IPBES requires all lead authors to complete conflict-of-interest statements.
Watson told Nature that the IPBES conflict-of-interest committee “looked carefully” at the industry scientists’ CVs and “concluded there is no conflict”. In addition, Watson says that the IPBES has “checks and balances” in place — such as planned independent reviews of its procedures in 2017 and 2018 — to ensure that everything is above board.
“The independent review will be critical,” says Thomas Brooks, head of science at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Gland, Switzerland. The IPBES has proposed to hand over the leadership of the review to the International Council for Science, a non-governmental organization representing scientific bodies and unions, but Brooks says that the IPBES should select a consultancy company through a competitive and open process.
Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of the IPBES, says that the body will decide how to conduct the reviews at the end of its Kuala Lumpur meeting, on 28 February. The meeting will also set the IPBES budget for the next two years and decide whether it should conduct a global assessment of sustainable biodiversity use, as well as a separate review on invasive species.
The IPBES is currently working on four regional biodiversity assessments including in Africa and the Americas, and a separate assessment of land degradation, all of which it hopes to complete by 2018.

xoplanet Census Suggests Earth Is Special after All

A new tally proposes that roughly 700 quintillion terrestrial exoplanets are likely to exist across the observable universe—most vastly different from Earth

A new tally proposes that roughly 700 quintillion terrestrial exoplanets are likely to exist across the observable universe—most vastly different from Earth

More than 400 years ago Renaissance scientist Nicolaus Copernicus reduced us to near nothingness by showing that our planet is not the center of the solar system. With every subsequent scientific revolution, most other privileged positions in the universe humans might have held dear have been further degraded, revealing the cold truth that our species is the smallest of specks on a speck of a planet, cosmologically speaking. A new calculation of exoplanets suggests that Earth is just one out of a likely 700 million trillion terrestrial planets in the entire observable universe. But the average age of these planets—well above Earth’s age—and their typical locations—in galaxies vastly unlike the Milky Way—just might turn the Copernican principle on its head.
Astronomer Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University and his colleagues created a cosmic compendium of all the terrestrial exoplanets likely to exist throughout the observable universe, based on the rocky worlds astronomers have found so far. In a powerful computer simulation, they first created their own mini universe containing models of the earliest galaxies. Then they unleashed the laws of physics—as close as scientists understand them—that describe how galaxies grow, how stars evolve and how planets come to be. Finally, they fast-forwarded through 13.8 billion years of cosmic history. Their results, published to the preprint server arXiv (pdf) and submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, provide a tantalizing trove of probable exoplanet statistics that helps astronomers understand our place in the universe. “It's kind of mind-boggling that we're actually at a point where we can begin to do this,” says co-author Andrew Benson from the Carnegie Observatories in California. Until recently, he says, so few exoplanets were known that reasonable extrapolations to the rest of the universe were impossible. Still, his team’s findings are a preliminary guess at what the cosmos might hold. “It's certainly the case that there are a lot of uncertainties in a calculation like this. Our knowledge of all of these pieces is imperfect,” he adds.
Take exoplanets as an example. NASA’s Kepler space telescope is arguably one of the world’s best planet hunters, but it uses a method so challenging that it is often compared with looking across thousands of kilometers to see a firefly buzzing around a brilliant searchlight. Because the telescope looks for subtle dimming in a star’s light from planets crossing in front of it, Kepler has an easier time spotting massive planets orbiting close to their stars. Thus, the catalogue of planets Kepler has found lean heavily toward these types, and smaller, farther-out planets are underrepresented, leaving our knowledge of planetary systems incomplete. Astronomers do use other techniques to search for smaller planets orbiting at farther distances, but these methods are still relatively new and have not yet found nearly as many worlds as Kepler. In addition, “everything we know about exoplanets is from a very small patch in our galaxy,” Zackrisson says, within which most stars are pretty similar to one another in terms of how many heavy elements they contain and other characteristics. The team had to extrapolate in order to guess how planets might form around stars with fewer heavy elements, such as those found in small galaxies or the early universe.
The scientists also have similar concerns about the galactic and cosmological inputs of their model but nonetheless they suspect that their final numbers are accurate to within an order of magnitude. With the estimated errors taken into account, the researchers conclude that Earth stands as a mild violation of the Copernican principle. Our pale blue dot might just be special after all. “It's not too much of a fluke that we could arise in a galaxy like the Milky Way, but nevertheless, it's just enough to make you think twice about it,” says Jay Olson from Boise State University, who was not involved in the study. Both he and Zackrisson think the Copernican principle could be saved by some unknown caveat to the findings. “Whenever you find something that sticks out…” Zackrisson says, “…that means that either we are the result of a very improbable lottery draw or we don’t understand how the lottery works.”
But Max Tegmark from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who also was not part of the research, thinks Earth is a colossal violation of the Copernican principle—not because of its location but because of its young age. “If you have these civilizations that had a 3.5-billion-year head start on us, why haven't they colonized our galaxy?” asks Tegmark. “To me, the most likely explanation is that if the planets are a dime a dozen, then highly intelligent life evolves only rarely.” So should we feel insignificant? Should we be reduced to near nothingness? Not at all, he says. “It might be that one day in the distant future much of our universe will be teeming with life because of what we did here.”

Polish scientists protest over plan to log in Białowieża Forest

Nature | News

Polish scientists protest over plan to log in Białowieża Forest

Researchers suspect motives for a planned increase in felling are commercial, but forest administration cites pest control.

Raymond Gehman/Corbis

European bison in Białowieża Forest, where Poland’s government is considering increased logging.

A Polish proposal to increase logging in the ancient Białowieża Forest is drawing fresh criticism from scientists. They suspect that the motives are partly commercial, and dispute claims that an outbreak of bark beetle threatens the forest. The Polish Ministry of the Environment says that there is no commercial benefit to the proposed logging and insists that it is needed for pest control.
The 1,500-square-kilometre forest, which straddles the Poland–Belarus border, has remained largely unchanged for centuries, making it a matchless stomping ground for researchers tracing the behaviour and ecology of insects, birds and mammals, including the largest population of European bison (Bison bonasus).
It is also a source of ecological measurements, for example on regeneration after disturbances, that inform forest management elsewhere, says Rafał Kowalczyk, director of the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Mammal Research Institute in the village of Białowieża.
A Białowieża management plan limits logging in the forest to 48,000 cubic metres of wood per year — enough to allow locals to gather firewood. But on 10 November, the local forest administration proposed an amendment that would allow large-scale logging in sections outside the central 17% of the forest that is a national park. They cited an outbreak of the bark beetle pest (Ips typographus) in Białowieża’s Norway spruce (Picea abies). In one forest district where logging is currently limited to 6,000 m³ per year, the allowable yearly volume would increase to 53,000 m³.
On 18 November, scientists with Poland’s State Council for Nature Conservation condemned the proposal; public protests have followed. This week in Nature, Polish biologists express other concerns in two Correspondence articles (P. Chylarecki and N. Selva Nature 530, 419; 2016; P. Michalak Nature 530, 419; 2016).
Conservation council member and Correspondence author Przemysław Chylarecki, who is an ornithologist at the Museum and Institute of Zoology in Warsaw, suspects that commercial considerations, not just pest control, are behind the plan. Poland’s government was elected in October — and the environment minister referred to the wasted commercial potential of unlogged trees in his election campaign, notes Chylarecki.
But an environment ministry spokesman, Jacek Krzemiński, says that there is no commercial incentive because the wood is only good for firewood, and the costs of logging and transport make it unprofitable to sell the wood on.
Kowalczyk, who also opposes the logging proposal, says that the pest-control argument is misguided. Recurring bark-beetle outbreaks do not endanger the forest at large because more-resilient tree species spread and replace spruce, he says. “That’s a perfectly natural process and endlessly preferable to cutting down trees.” But Jarosław Krawczyk, spokesman for the regional state forest directorate in Białystok, says that the current outbreak is unprecedented in scale and has already begun to attack other tree species.
A detailed assessment of forest health is under way, says Krzemiński. Earlier this month, a regional environment agency suggested that the amount of extra logging be reduced to half of the volume proposed in the new management plan, whereas Poland’s national forest authority has yet to weigh in. Depending on its opinion, the ministry will decide on the amendment later this year, Krzemiński told Nature.

Ebola survivor’s blood holds promise of new treatment

Nature | News

Ebola survivor’s blood holds promise of new treatment

Antibody from man who survived infection from 1995 outbreak shows potent effect against deadly virus.

Nature | News

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Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images

A survivor of the 1995 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo produced a powerful Ebola antibody.

The blood of a man who survived an Ebola outbreak nearly 20 years ago is helping scientists to develop a treatment against the disease.
The survivor produced some of the strongest protective proteins, or antibodies, against Ebola found so far, researchers report in two papers published today in the journal Science^{1, 2}. One of these antibodies, dubbed mAb114, is capable of saving monkeys infected with Ebola.
“It’s really stunning that a single antibody can protect against Ebola,” says Nancy Sullivan, a viral immunologist at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, who led the research identifying the antibody.
The antibody donor, identified only as “subject 1”, became severely ill with Ebola in 1995, during an outbreak of the virus in Kikwit, Democratic Republic of the Congo. After weeks battling the disease, subject 1 recovered and went back to the Ebola wards to help care for other patients.
Eleven years later, scientists drew his blood and isolated the mAb114 antibody. In subsequent tests, the purified antibody saved the lives in of six infected monkeys. Some of the animals recovered despite not receiving treatment until five days after infection. Only one other potential Ebola treatment has proved as powerful in animal studies: the antibody cocktail known as ZMapp.

Search for treatments

ZMapp and other similar drugs have been given to more than 80 patients during the Ebola outbreak. On 23 February, researchers reported the results of a clinical trial involving 71 of those patients. Thirty-six people were given ZMapp and 78% of them survived, compared with 63% of patients who did not receive the drug.
But that result is not statistically significant. And Mapp Biopharmaceutical of San Diego, California, which developed ZMapp, was forced to end the clinical trial in January without achieving its goal of enrolling 200 patients because of the waning of the Ebola outbreak.
It is not clear whether the new antibody could overcome some of the drawbacks to treating patients with ZMapp. For instance, patients must be infused with relatively large amounts of the drug, and researchers suspect that this may be one reason why so many of those treated develop side effects. Six of 13 patients evacuated from West Africa and treated with ZMapp or closely related drugs in the current Ebola outbreak, for instance, developed side effects including fever, rashes and welts, rapid heart rate and low blood pressure³.
The National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease, which ran the ZMapp clinical trial with the Liberian ministry of health, said that 25% of patients experienced side effects to the first infusion of the drug, mostly fevers, but that side effects tapered off with each subsequent dose; 10% of patients had side effects after the third infusion.
“The fact that you have to pump people full of antibody for it to work is one of the biggest problems with these therapies,” says infectious-disease researcher Kristian Andersen at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. “That’s going to be a very important question to address.”
One of the studies¹ released today tested mAb114 at similar doses to ZMapp, but Sullivan says that further work will explore whether lower doses are effective.

Viral trick bested

From examining the structure of mAb114, Sullivan and her colleagues conclude that its potency probably arises from its ability to stop the Ebola virus from hijacking the body’s immune defences².
Ebola docks to receptor proteins inside cells, which allows the virus to reproduce itself. Ebola hides the protein that it uses to bind to these receptors — revealing it only after gaining access to the cell's deep interior, where the receptor is found. Normally, this prevents antibodies that bind to Ebola outside cells from stopping the virus from reproducing.
But Sullivan and her colleagues found that mAb114 binds to Ebola viruses, follows them into cells, and blocks the viruses from releasing their deadly payload inside the cell.
Sullivan says that her team now plans further work to test whether mAb114 is safe in humans. She says that even though ZMapp looks promising, researchers would prefer to have several possible candidate drugs to choose from in case, for instance, some work better than others or are easier to make.
“It’s sensible to not put all your eggs in one basket,” Sullivan says.

Exoplanet Census Suggests Earth Is Special after All

A new tally proposes that roughly 700 quintillion terrestrial exoplanets are likely to exist across the observable universe—most vastly different from Earth

A new tally proposes that roughly 700 quintillion terrestrial exoplanets are likely to exist across the observable universe—most vastly different from Earth