Last night before going to bed, I lazily glanced at Twitter and glimpsed dark images that turned into nightmares. To spare everyone the same reaction tonight, this OND sandwiches the grim news between top and bottom crusts of delightful news (unless you’re Bambi). Also, don’t miss the study that found cats and dogs are as susceptible to COVID-19 as humans, although like almost all COVID news, it’s only conditionally true until we learn more and more and more ….
press democrat
Eight youngsters were tallied in the Lassen Pack in northeastern California, according to an April-through-June report from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. Genetic testing of their excrement shows at least four are male and two are female, according to the agency.
The father is a black-furred male that began traveling with the pack last year. He isn’t related to any other known California wolves, and his origin isn’t clear, the agency said.
The pack in Lassen County now has at least 14 animals. [Editor’s Note: Presumably all 14 animals are grey wolves. 🙅🏻 ]
science mag
For breeding birds, timing is everything. Most species have just a narrow window to get the food they need to feed their brood—after spring’s bounty has sprung, but before other bird species swoop in to compete. Now, a new study suggests that as the climate warms, birds are not only breeding earlier, but their breeding windows are also shrinking—some by as many as 4 to 5 days. This could lead to increased competition for food that might threaten many bird populations.
Birds typically time their breeding to cues signaling the start of spring, so that their chicks hatch when food like plants and insects is most abundant. But global warming has pushed many species to breed earlier in the year; that effect is especially prominent at higher latitudes, where temperatures are rising faster than near the equator. Few studies, however, have examined how climate change affects the duration of breeding windows, which closely track the number of chicks born each year as well as overall population trends. [...]
On average, the beginnings and ends of the breeding periods are occurring earlier in the year, Hällfors and colleagues report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. However, the ends are shifting back faster than the beginnings, resulting in an average breeding window that is 1.7 days shorter in 2017 than it was in 1975. During that same period, Finland’s average temperature rose by 0.8oC, suggesting many bird species are actively responding to changing temperatures, Hällfors says.
It seems like such a simple question: How hot is Earth going to get? Yet for 40 years, climate scientists have repeated the same unsatisfying answer: If humans double atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from preindustrial levels, the planet will eventually warm between 1.5°C and 4.5°C—a temperature range that encompasses everything from a merely troubling rise to a catastrophic one.
Now, in a landmark effort, a team of 25 scientists has significantly narrowed the bounds on this critical factor, known as climate sensitivity. The assessment, conducted under the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and publishing this week in Reviews of Geophysics, relies on three strands of evidence: trends indicated by contemporary warming, the latest understanding of the feedback effects that can slow or accelerate climate change, and lessons from ancient climates. They support a likely warming range of between 2.6°C and 3.9°C, says Steven Sherwood, one of the study’s lead authors and a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales. “This is the number that really controls how bad global warming is going to be.”
The new study is the payoff of decades of advances in climate science, says James Hansen, the famed retired NASA climate scientist who helped craft the first sensitivity range in 1979. “It is an impressive, comprehensive study, and I am not just saying that because I agree with the result. Whoever shepherded this deserves our gratitude.”
Same news different presentation with a punch 🤜🏼
For more than 100 years, scientists have predicted the existence of metal-eating bacteria. But none has been found—until now, Science News reports. Two environmental microbiologists left a jar covered in manganese carbonate, a pink metal compound, in the sink to soak. Ten weeks later, they returned to something remarkable. The jar’s contents had been replaced with a new substance, dark and crusty. And two new species of bacteria were responsible, according to a study the researchers published last week in Nature. The bacteria, tentatively christened Candidatus Manganitrophus nodulliformans and Ramlicbacter lithotrophicus, can borrow electrons from metals like manganese and use them as fuel for growth. When metals lose electrons, they oxidize; in the case of the dirty jar, this caused the contents to transform from manganese carbonate into manganese oxide (above). Because both species likely came from tap water, the findings could help control manganese oxide pollution in drinking water, the researchers say.
Botany One
new york times
Vampire bats, those bloodsucking, flying critters with razor-sharp teeth, are rather social beings. They love grooming one another and sharing food supplies, which consists of regurgitated blood from some other unfortunate mammal. These bats also call out to one another when they’re apart from their group.
But when they’re ill, they call out less frequently and have fewer interactions with family and friends, new research suggests. [...]
Mr. Stockmaier and his fellow researchers say it is much like that miserable lethargy you feel when an illness settles in and all you want to do is lie in bed.
The researchers found that on average, when vampire bats are feeling sick, they call out 30 percent less frequently than when they are healthy. And whether intentional or not, it should have a beneficial side effect of limiting the spread of whatever pathogen is afflicting them.
I added bold and italics in the first sentence here because WTF does NYT think humans are if not animals?
There are two subspecies of Aedes aegypti: one that prefers humans and one that prefers animals; most populations are a genetic mix. After sending the eggs to New Jersey to grow new colonies, and then tempting the insects with the sweet smells of human and of rodent, the researchers found that the more human-loving mosquitoes tended to come from areas with a dry climate and dense human population. That, in turn, is because humans provide the water mosquitoes need to breed. [….]
“I was just sitting with my arm in the tube doing this trial over and over again,” Dr. Rose said. He spent “a couple months of my life” as mosquito bait, repeating the experiment hundreds of times while listening to audiobooks. (A favorite was Anna Burns’ “Milkman,” about The Troubles in Ireland. Screens kept him and the guinea pig from actually being bitten.)
Within minutes, mosquitoes, attracted to either the human or the nonhuman scent, would pick a tube and enter it. Later, the tubes were removed to count the mosquitoes and figure out how many preferred Dr. Rose.
The resulting data revealed that mosquitoes that originally came from very dense areas — more than 5,000 people per square mile — liked humans more. (They also had more ancestry from the human-preferring subspecies.) A bigger factor, however, was climate. Specifically, mosquitoes that came from places that had a rainy season followed by a long, hot, dry season greatly preferred humans.
PLOS.ORG
As the world’s human population increases, transformation of natural landscapes into urban habitats continues to increase. In Africa, rates of human population growth and urbanisation are among the highest in the world, but the impacts of these processes on the continent’s biodiversity remain largely unexplored. Furthermore, the effects of ongoing anthropogenic climate change are likely to be severe and to interact with urbanisation.
Some organisms appear resilient to urbanisation, and even proliferate in human-modified environments. One such species is the peregrine falcon Falco peregrinus in Cape Town, South Africa. Using a long-term data set (1989–2014), we investigate the relationship between breeding attempts, timing of breeding and breeding performance under varying weather conditions. Exploring these issues along an urbanisation gradient, we focus on the role of artificially provided nest boxes, and their capacity to buffer against extreme weather events. Pairs in more urbanised areas, and particularly those in nest boxes, were more likely to breed and to commence breeding earlier. Additionally, pairs using nest boxes were more likely to breed in years with higher rainfall. Warm and dry weather conditions generally advanced the timing of breeding, although this relationship with weather was not seen for urban pairs using nest boxes. Furthermore, weather did not impact breeding performance directly (breeding success and fledged brood size), but timing of breeding did, with earlier breeders producing more fledglings.
Our study shows that falcons breeding in specially provided nest boxes were less sensitive to local weather dynamics than pairs using more natural nest sites. This has important implications as it suggests that the managed provision of such nesting sites can help this key urban species to cope with extreme weather events, which are predicted to increase with climate change.
sci news
A team of marine ecologists from Oregon State University has described the formation and development of a new methane seep — a location where methane escapes from an underground reservoir and into the ocean — in the Ross Sea, the High Antarctic.
The study involved 355 participants (mean age – 35.3 years) with an interest in lucid dreaming and was conducted entirely via the internet, allowing people from around the world to complete the study at home. [...]
The results showed the MILD technique and the SSILD technique were similarly effective for inducing lucid dreams, while predictors of successful lucid dream induction included superior general dream recall and the ability to fall asleep within ten minutes of completing the lucid dream induction techniques.
(iii) MILD, a technique that involves waking up after five hours of sleep and then developing the intention to remember that you are dreaming before returning to sleep, by repeating the phrase ‘The next time I’m dreaming, I will remember that I’m dreaming;’ you also imagine yourself in a lucid dream;
(iv) SSILD, a technique that involves waking up after five hours of sleep and then repeatedly focusing your attention on visual, auditory, and physical sensations for 20 seconds each before returning to sleep; this technique is similar to mindfulness meditation but involved repeatedly shifting your focus;
nature
Cats and dogs are just as likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 as people are, according to a survey in northern Italy that is the largest study of pets so far.
Nicola Decaro at the University of Bari and his colleagues took nose, throat or rectal swabs of 540 dogs and 277 cats in northern Italy between March and May (E. I. Patterson et al. Preprint at bioRxiv http://doi.org/d4r7; 2020). The animals lived in homes with infected people, or in regions severely affected by COVID-19.
None of the pets tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA, but in further tests of antibodies against the virus circulating in the blood of some animals, the researchers found that around 3% of dogs and 4% of cats showed evidence of previous infection.
Infection rates among cats and dogs were comparable with those among people in Europe at the time of testing, suggesting that it is not unusual for pets to be infected. The findings have not yet been peer reviewed.
Humans as far back as AD 600 carried variola, an international research team reported this week1 after years of fishing for viral DNA in ancient human remains. The analysis also implies that the virus was circulating in humans even earlier: at least 1,700 years back, in the turbulent period around the fall of the Western Roman Empire, when many peoples were migrating across Eurasia.
The research pushes DNA evidence of smallpox back by a millennium. In 2016, researchers had dated it to the seventeenth century, using DNA extracted from a Lithuanian mummy2. “We’ve shown that 1,000 years earlier, during the Viking Age, variola was already quite widespread in Europe,” says Martin Sikora, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and a member of the team.
australian geography
eureka alert
Saturn is truly the lord of the rings in this latest snapshot from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, taken on July 4, 2020, when the opulent giant world was 839 million miles from Earth. This new Saturn image was taken during summer in the planet's northern hemisphere.