Big nature news from the northwest corner of California—scientist documents and studies salamanders who dive out of trees and surf through the air, while the Yurok share their successful project to return condors to the redwood forests. Both the eastern and western monarch subpopulations showed improvement this year—overwintering numbers from Mexico were released last week—although both are well below the estimated size necessary to sustain the populations. This week’s cockroach report is a startling story about human actions driving cockroach evolution and also altering their sexual behavior (plus TIL cockroach males have two penises). In non-nature news, computers that shared quantum entanglement teleported information from one to another, some of Mercury is here on earth, and progress towards manifesting the Unruh effect.
This is Overnight News Digest Science Saturday.
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Eastern monarchs
The three nations (USA, Mexico, Canada) cooperating to conserve the eastern population set 6 hectares as the monarch wintering area size/level needed to sustain monarch migration.
The World Wildlife Fund Mexico has just released results of the annual survey of monarch butterflies overwintering in central Mexico. The butterflies occupied an estimated 2.835 hectares of forest during the winter of 2021–22. This represents an increase of approximately 35% compared to the previous winter (2020-21), when monarchs occupied 2.1 hectares.
The Mexico count follows the release of the Xerces Society's Western Monarch Thanksgiving Count that tallied 247,237 monarch butterflies observed across the West, an over 100-fold increase from the previous year’s total of less than 2,000 monarchs and the highest total since 2016.
While this year’s numbers from Mexico and the western U.S. are steps in the right direction, they still indicate a severe population decline in both the eastern and western population over recent decades, and with a long way to go to recover this species. Western monarchs have declined by more than 95% since the 1980s, while the eastern population has declined by over 70% in the last three decades.
western monarchs
We’ve fed cockroaches so much sugary poison that we’ve accidently created roaches who eschew sweets.
Bad news for our pesticides baited with sugar, but also bad news for cockroach sex because the big draw for the female is the male’s “’sugars and fats squished out of his tergal gland. As the lovely lady nibbles, the male locks onto her with one penis while another penis delivers a sperm package.” No problem—right?—less cockroach sex means fewer roaches, but, “As to how this will affect the population, it’s really complicated,’ said Dr. Wada-Katsumata … I think that’s what makes this so compelling,” Dr. Schal said. ‘The idea that humans impose very strong selection on animals around us, especially inside our home, and that the animals respond not only with physiological changes, but also with behavioral changes.’
“From a scientific perspective, the German cockroach’s sugar saga shows how humans can drive both natural selection — the cockroaches that survive our poison traps — as well as sexual selection — the glucose-averse cockroaches who no longer want to mate with cockroaches that still offer sweet snacks.”
dinos started off warm-blooded and evolved into cold bloodedness
“...many dinosaurs as well as their winged relatives, the pterosaurs, were ancestrally warm-blooded. But in a twist, the research also suggests that some herbivorous dinosaurs spent tens of millions of years evolving a coldblooded metabolism more like those of contemporary and ancient reptiles.”
Emperor penguins don’t have nests, they carry the eggs on their feet and keep moving.
The clunky robot was designed to keep track of these penguin individuals and their mobile ‘nests.’
skydiving, or more accurately sky surfing, salamanders
“In one of the tallest trees on Earth, a tan, mottled salamander ventures out on a fern growing high up on the trunk. Reaching the edge, the amphibian leaps, like a skydiver exiting a plane.
The salamander’s confidence, it seems, is well-earned. The bold amphibians can expertly control their descent, gliding while maintaining a skydiver’s spread-out posture, researchers report May 23 in Current Biology.”
the unruh effect
“If you could observe the Unruh effect in person, it might look a bit like jumping to hyperspace in the Millennium Falcon—a sudden rush of light bathing your view of an otherwise black void. As an object accelerates in a vacuum, it becomes swaddled in a warm cloak of glowing particles. The faster the acceleration, the warmer the glow.”
the omg effect
“Ronald Hanson at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and his colleagues built a simple network containing a number of diamond-based qubits arranged into three nodes, dubbed Alice, Bob and Charlie. There was no direct connection between Alice and Charlie, only an indirect link each shared with Bob. But Alice and Charlie shared a quantum entanglement, which means it is impossible to measure information from one of them without changing the state of the other.
When Charlie’s quantum state was changed, Alice’s state also changed, meaning information ‘teleported’ across Bob without passing through it.
‘It’s really teleportation as in science-fiction movies,’ says Hanson. “The state, or information, really disappears on one side and appears on the other side, and because it’s not travelling the space in between, [the data] can also not get lost.’”
near visalia, land subsidence is 0.92 inches per year. Eureka is sinking 0.4 inches per year (and it’s right on the coast)
prey go neesh returns to the yurok’s homeland in northwestern california redwood forests
“To the Yurok people, the California condor, whose Yurok name is preygoneesh, embodies the spirit of renewal. It heads the scavenger sanitation crew: When preygoneesh eats, so does everybody. But preygoneesh has been absent from this beach for over a century. The ravens and vultures have to look elsewhere for a meal. The seal carcass bloats in the sun, wasted.
Preygoneesh’s decline accompanied Americans’ push Westward in the mid-1800s, a manifest casualty of the usual suspects: habitat destruction, novelty hunting by collectors and killings out of misplaced fear. Prey go neesh once ranged from what’s now called Mexico to British Columbia, from the Pacific to New York. The birds can travel 100-200 miles per day on 9.5-foot wingspans that can take them to 15,000 feet (2.8 miles), even higher than eagles. But by the 1980s, only 22 were left, their range diminished like a reservation to a sliver of skies over central and Southern California. Because they declined so early, Western scientists were never able to study healthy condor populations in the wild. What their thriving looks like is a mystery.
Except to Indigenous communities like the Yurok.”
Two condors were released earlier in May and show signs of successfully establishing their lives. last week, a third condor was released, the sole female of the first cohort.
“Shortly after the condor exited the facility, Yurok Wildlife Department Director Tiana Williams-Claussen shared her thoughts on the release of the first female condor to fly free in Yurok Country since 1892. The following message is from her: "A0 has joined her cohort brothers, Poy'-we-son (A3) and Nes-kwe-chokw' (A2) as a free flying bird. I have chosen Ney-gem' 'Ne-chween-kah as her nickname from us. It's a heavy name. It means "She carries our prayers." There's a lot of thought and a lot of heart that goes with that name.”