environmental adaptation Archives - Page 2 of 4

The FWP weekly digest of wondrous wildlife happenings
and other interesting items from the natural world

Creatures to meet | Things to learn
Things to do

Lisa S. French

1.5-minute read

What if New York City, the most densely populated urban area in the United States, could be transformed into a green oasis that’s also a haven for winged wildlife? Can we make more room for nature, so the city is less concrete and more jungle? You bet—think vertical!

There are roughly 36,700 acres of handily sun-facing rooftops in NYC—equivalent to 27,803 football fields or 44 Central Parks. That’s a whole lot of valuable space to create healthy, productive habitat for plants, pollinators, and feathered friends—sky meadows teeming with life—wildflowers, songbirds, butterflies, bees. Greening rooftops would not only make the city a force for nature restoration but would help to preserve wildlife in non-urban areas as well. Connecting fragments of habitat would provide migrating and breeding birds with access to life-sustaining vegetation and food resources where and when they’re needed most.

Researchers from Fordham University investigating the potential for NYC green roofs to attract semi-urban and non-urban birds compared avian visitors to green and conventional roofs in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx during spring migration and summer breeding seasons. They found that birds that typically avoid the Big Apple will make an exception for green roofs that provide the right combination of plants and insects for foraging.

With rapid urbanization and loss of green space, most migratory birds will encounter cityscapes in their travels. Providing rooftop recharging stations planted with bird and insect-friendly vegetation will help increase their odds of survival in a warming world. And green roofs aren’t just for the birds—they also benefit people by cleaning and cooling the air, decreasing noise, and reducing storm runoff. Plus, they’re more lovely to look at. Now that’s a sweet city!

You can check out some inspiring examples of NYC green roofs here and global living architecture projects here. And if you’d like to learn more about what it takes to turn regular old urban rooftops into beautiful life-sustaining habitats, watch this video from NYC Audubon.

Whether you’re urban or rural or somewhere in-between, if you’ve been topping up the winter chow to help out hungry local birds, you can get the inside scoop on the pecking order at the feeder and who comes out on top from Audubon. Here in Manhattan, it’s the doves—always the doves. Update: Be sure to have a look at Carla Rhodes’ wonderful snaps of New York birds getting their fair share—doves on cleanup crew.

Speaking of local birds, congratulations to the 2021 MLS Cup Champions—the New York City FC, aka the Pigeons. Well done and welcome back to your urban habitat!

…

Lisa S. French December 14, 2021

Traveling Wildebeest Alert

1.5-minute read

One of the most spectacular events in the natural world is taking place now in the African Serengeti—the awe-inspiring, seasonal wildebeest migration. In late spring through fall, up to 1.5 million wildebeest and thousands of zebra and Thomson’s gazelles embark on the long trek from the treeless plains of the southern Serengeti in Tanzania, north to the savannas and woodlands of Kenya.

Navigating Mara River rapids and dodging the hungry lions, cheetahs, and hyenas that trail the herd is no small feat, so what motivates these high plains drifters to travel so far in such massive numbers? Survival.

Like many migrating species, wildebeests are on a mission to find food. These bearded relatives of antelopes can weigh up to 600 muscle-packed pounds. Maintaining almost a billion pounds of wildebeest-i-ness across the herd requires a tremendous amount of grass and water. When the dry season begins in May and food and water are in short supply, wildebeests head west and north, following a route determined by rainfall, grass growth, and access to prime grazing real estate. In early winter, they complete the 300-mile migration loop, tracking the rain and grass back down to the southern plains. Every February, approximately 8,000 calves a day are born in transit and are up on their hooves toddling along with the herd in just three hours—the great migration and life cycle of the wildebeest continues uninterrupted.

The remarkable journey of these African ungulates has now inspired scientists to create algorithms that mimic the highly efficient swarm-like movement of the herd, which instinctually finds the shortest route to the greenest pastures. Intelligent algorithms based on these natural patterns of wildebeest herd migration could be used in cutting-edge applications ranging from unmanned vehicles and planetary mapping to nanobots that can target and destroy cancer cells—because nature is the most intelligent system of all.

Wherever you are in the world, you can keep tabs on the amazing traveling wildebeests courtesy of HerdTracker. Compared to the congestion of mega-migration, this summer’s bumper-to-bumper beach-bound traffic doesn’t seem so bad after all…

If you’d like to learn more about the megafauna of the Serengeti, we highly recommend Animals of the Masai Mara (Wildlife Explorer Guides), by Adam Scott Kennedy and Vicki Kennedy.

…

Lisa S. French July 30, 2021

Fishy Antifreeze

1-minute read

It’s officially summer in the northern hemisphere. With record-breaking high temperatures already being recorded in the U.S., Canada, parts of Europe, and the Arctic, it looks like 2021 is going to be another climate change-intensified scorcher.

If you’re in need of a way to keep cool—really cool—how about a little cold water swimming? And what could be more refreshingly chilling than a dip in a polar sea? Well, as tempting as that may seem when the thermometer reads 116°F, unlike polar fishes, we gill-free types are just not equipped to last long in cold water. So what do our piscine pals have that we don’t to help them survive frigid marine temperatures? Bodies fortified with antifreeze.

To manage the challenges of a life lived in icy seas, Arctic and Antarctic fish species that aren’t able to migrate to warmer waters evolved with antifreeze proteins in their blood and body tissues. These protective proteins lower the freezing point of polar fishes to below water temperature. When they come into contact with ice crystals either on their skin or gills or through eating or drinking, the antifreeze binds to the ice to prevent the scaly swimmers from turning into fish-icles. Now, how cool is that?

If you’d like to learn more about which animals have adapted to life in the coldest environment on the planet, the New Zealand government has created a splendidly informative poster of the wildlife occupying the world’s largest marine protected area in Antarctica’s Ross Sea.

And if you’re keen to swim with fishes of the non-polar variety this summer, courtesy of The Guardian, scientist Heather Massey has some tips on how to avoid hypothermia while paddling in open waters.

Fishy business aside, just a reminder that extreme heat, like extreme cold, can be life-threatening. If you’re suffering through triple-digit temperatures and can’t make it to a pool or the beach, Google the location of your nearest cooling center and head on over. For tips on how to manage a heat wave without air conditioning, check out this list from MedicineNet. Keep cool. Stay safe.

…

Lisa S. French June 29, 2021

Zebras: Snazzy-Suited Insect Repellers

1.5-minute read

It would be understandable if the zebra’s fellow savanna dwellers experienced pelt envy. The wild horses’ intricate black and white coat patterning is an extraordinary sight to behold. According to researchers at the University of California at Davis, there is more to the snazzy fur of the African equine than meets the eye. After a century of stripe speculation, scientists studying how differences in color and pattern help species adapt to their natural environment have concluded that the zebra’s markings aren’t just good-looking—they’re functional, signaling pesky biting flies to bug off.

So how do zebra stripes repel insects? As it turns out, dreaded blood-sucking, disease-carrying tsetse, stable, and horse flies are fairly picky when it comes to landing sites. They are far less likely to land on black and white striped surfaces than either all white or all black surfaces. And the greater the number and the narrower the stripes, the fewer the insect attacks. Researchers discovered that zebras in regions of Africa with more flies had more and thinner stripes, especially on the vulnerable face and legs where flies bite while the animals graze.

You may be wondering why zebras, in particular, evolved to develop insect-repelling markings. Biologists believe that because zebras have shorter and thinner fur than many other horse species, nature may have equipped the African equine with the extra protection of stripes to help increase its odds of survival on the savannas.

Even with built-in bug protection, zebras will need ongoing assistance from their friends to keep prettifying the planet. There are currently three species of stripey-suited wild horses roaming the African continent: the plains, mountain, and endangered Grevy’s zebras. As a result of habitat loss, poaching, disease, competition for food, and lack of access to water, Grevy’s populations have declined from 15,000 in the 1970s to only 3,000 across Kenya and Ethiopia. You can find out how conservationists are working to prevent the extinction of one of Africa’s largest remaining land animals and how you can pitch in to help at Grevy’s Zebra Trust and Ol Pejeta Conservancy.

What else this week? June 4th and 5th, 2021, kick off the Virtual Launch Gala for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration—a global rallying cry to heal the planet. Can we get a determined woohoo for getting out there to reimagine, restore, and recreate healthy ecosystems? Generation restoration—heck yeah!

And on the local-to-FWP front, for the very first time, Cornell University scientists have recorded humpbacks singing in the waters off New York City. Have a listen to their haunting whale songs—goosebumps! Happy to have you, big fellas—be careful out there!

…

Lisa S. French June 4, 2021

Why the Big Brain, Octopus?

2.5-minute read

The world was a vastly different place when we posted our first entry dedicated to the beauty, mystery, and magic of nature in December of 2018. We can’t be sure what challenges lie ahead post-pandemic, but as long as the planet keeps going, so do we. And like Earth, we rely on a little help from our friends, so thank you very much for reading! We’re celebrating our 100th blog post with a title tweak from Weekly Wondrous to Wild & Wondrous, some insight on the intelligence of the octopus—and a mountain of cake. We hope you’ll join us!

Coming out of your shell has its benefits. For example, you might become smarter and grow lots of limbs—if you’re an octopus, that is. When the marine mollusk shed its shell about 530 million years ago, it got two anatomical upgrades: super flexible arms, and a bigger brain to coordinate them. While the octopus may resemble a vacuum bag with adjustable attachments, there is more to the weirdly wonderful animal than meets the eye. It has evolved to become one of our oceans’ most clever occupants.

High intelligence typically occurs in long-lived species like elephants, apes, whales, and dolphins that have to manage interdependent social bonds. Although octopuses only live about two years, are usually loners, and don’t nurture their young, the invertebrates developed a very sophisticated nervous system that rivals vertebrates in size and complexity.

So, why the big brain? Researchers at the University of Cambridge believe that once the octopus emerged from its protective housing, the increase in intelligence and growth of flexible limbs enabled the shell-less mollusk to survive in a much wider range of environments. The 300 species of octopus have adapted to diverse marine habitats all around the world. Plus, the vulnerable, soft-bodied animals needed more developed sea-smarts to protect themselves from predators.

Just how smart are they? Problem solving and tool use are two hallmarks of advanced cognitive abilities in animals, and octopuses are able to do both, which means they’re pretty darn clever. Octopuses use stones and shells as armor against sharks and to block the entrance of their dens. When hiding places are hard to come by, they haul around coconut shells to use as makeshift mobile homes. And if they are caught between a den and a coconut shell, to discourage attacks, octopuses can change their skin color to mimic advancing predators. The masters of multi-tasking are also skilled at finding and extracting food from hard-to-reach places. Not only do they use their big brains to figure out how to pry open clams, mussels, and oysters, they can fetch food from a maze, open boxes, and remove lids from jars.

If you’re wondering if all octopus limbs are created equal, each of the eight arms can bend, lengthen, shorten, and turn clockwise and counter-clockwise in all directions. Scientists at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory observing ten wild-caught octopuses have recorded 16,563 arm movements in 120 minutes of video. Top that!

Similar to an elephant’s trunk, the octopus’ exceptionally flexible arms are primarily made of muscle and connective tissue and rely on internal pressure to create movement. Although they have a wide variety to choose from, octopuses prefer to use specific arms for specific tasks, like rear arms for walking versus front arms for exploring, and some are lefties and some are righties.

It’s obvious that the octopus is not your run-of-the-mill mollusk. Aiming to pass on the sea creature’s big brain benefits to humanity, scientists and engineers are continuing to study its cognitive ability and complex arm movements to help develop bio-inspired soft robots for use in medicine and industry. All we can say to that is, we’re glad you came out of your shell, octopus!

If you’re also feeling inspired by the marine animal’s amazing maneuverings, you can download giant Pacific octopus wallpaper from the Monterey Bay Aquarium for your daily viewing pleasure.

…

Lisa S. French February 21, 2021

To Bee or RoboBee

3-minute read

Sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;
where bees pray on their knees, sing praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them. — Carol Ann Duffy

Keep your eyes peeled, autonomous robotic bees may be coming to crop-fields near you. Measuring about half the length of a paper clip and weighing in at less than one-tenth of a gram, the insect-inspired microbots were developed by scientists at Wyss Institute to replace rapidly dwindling populations of bees, the world’s natural food crop pollinators.

While a global fleet of Robobees may sound pretty cool from a tech-wow perspective, when it comes to substituting pollinating machines for the real deal, researchers at the Centre for Agri-Environmental Research and Institute of Bee Health say not so fast. Before we roll out tiny red carpets to welcome substitute bees to the planet, according to an analysis published in Science of the Total Environment, we should consider a simpler, more holistic solution—protecting our natural pollinators and the landscapes they depend on for survival.

In the debate around bees versus Robobees, it turns out that replacing live bees with pollinating machines is not that straightforward. Bees have been honing their sophisticated sensory abilities and specialized pollination skills for over 130 million years in response to the unique shapes, scents, and colors of hundreds of thousands of flowering plants. While microbots may be capable of pollinating easy-access plants like sunflowers, the innate expertise of bees is hard to replicate across diverse crop species.

Not only are bees adaptable and super-skilled at their jobs, they also work for free, contributing between $235 to $577 billion to annual global food production. In contrast, robotic bees are pricey. At an estimated cost of $10 per microbot, replacing the billions of bees needed to pollinate crops with machine bees would run in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And unlike live bees, robotic bees need maintenance. Rather than creating a new machine-bee rental and repair industry, scientists argue that restoring pollinator habitats would be a far more cost-effective way to support food production. At a time when we are aiming to reduce our global carbon footprint, the environmental impact of manufacturing, distributing, and disposing of fleets of robotic bees could be enormous.

And bees don’t go about their important business in isolation. They’re critical components of biodiversity, helping to maintain the balance of environmental systems that support life on Earth. Replacing diverse pollinators with a single microbot is a risky business. It’s not clear what impact swarms of machine bees may have on the delicate interdependent workings of nature. The adage when you fix one thing, be careful not to break something else comes to mind.

The idea that we can address environmental problems by replacing elements of the natural world with technology-based substitutes is not a new one. As the guardians of the planet, we have the ability to transform our relationship with nature and apply innovative, emerging technologies to map, monitor, protect, and restore rather than replace. Because beyond their much-appreciated bottom-line contributions to food security, bees are iconic and beloved members of the community of life and play an important role in human culture and well-being.

How components of nature are valued depends on who is doing the valuing. We treasure these industrious insects not just for their productivity but also for their poetry. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of watching a pollen-flecked bumblebee drowse in a dahlia, we think you’ll agree that there are some things in life for which there are no substitutes. It’s just better with bees—tiny, perfect soul anchors for a world in flux.

…

Lisa S. French August 24, 2020

A Fish with Tooth-Covered, Retractable Eyeballs? Meet the Whale Shark!

2-minute read

If you’ve been celebrating Shark Week by binging and cringing your way through Jaws 1-4, you’re probably thinking that the massive teeth of those fictional fish are pretty darn scary. Well, maybe not the teeth so much as their limb-chomping potential. Now imagine a real-life shark with close to 3,000 teeth in its five-foot-wide mouth and a couple of thousand more covering its eyeballs. Talk about the fear factor! Except the real-life shark with all of those teeth is the whale shark (Rhincodon typus), and despite being about the size of a big yellow school bus, the primarily plankton-eating fish is quite a gentle creature.

While sharks are a notoriously toothy bunch, scientists at the Okinawa Churashima Research Center studying optical adaptations in vertebrates recently discovered that the whale shark has tiny teeth where they didn’t expect to find them—around its iris. So why does the whale shark need eye armor? Unlike most vertebrates, the fish has no eyelids to protect its small, protruding peepers from underwater hazards. The oak leaf-shaped tooth-like projections, known as denticles, shield the shark’s eyes from abrasions as it travels the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans in search of the large quantities of food that it needs to survive.

As if that evolutionary adaptation weren’t freaky enough, the whale shark has another unusual eye protection mechanism to compensate for its lack of lids. If the situation calls for it, the whale shark can retract its eyeballs into its eye sockets. One eye retraction event observed by researchers was in response to camera strobes. It seems that despite being popular subjects for underwater photographers, whale sharks are no fans of the flash. Although a few other lidless species, including electric rays, guitarfish, and leopard frogs can also tuck in their eyeballs, the whale shark’s retractable, armored eye combo is fairly rare.

Sadly, like many shark species, the whale shark is threatened with extinction. The global numbers of the large, slow-moving fish have more than halved over the last 75 years as a result of overfishing, bycatch (see video), and propeller strikes. The whale shark is now listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as endangered. As recently reported in Science, sharks are now functionally extinct in the waters of eight countries.

Even though these dentally well-endowed creatures may look like they can handle whatever comes their way, sharks still need all of the support that they can get when it comes to protecting their habitat. You can learn more about these fascinating fish and what you can do to help keep them safely in the swim from Ocean Conservancy. And you can track migrating whale sharks in real-time via satellite courtesy of Conservation International.

…

Lisa S. French August 15, 2020

Dolphin See, Dolphin Do

2-minute read

While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery amongst humans, for dolphins, believed to be the second most intelligent creatures on Earth, copying the behavior of finned friends is very much a practical matter—it’s all about upgrading fish acquisition skills.

According to new research from scientists working with the Dolphin Innovation Project at Australia’s Shark Bay Marine Reserve, the clever cetaceans are making the most of their ability to absorb and apply knowledge by forming alliances outside of their families and learning specialized tool-using techniques to increase the day’s catch.

Like many young in the animal kingdom, bottlenose dolphin calves typically pick up foraging know-how from their mothers. However, the Shark Bay study revealed that the cognitively advanced animals recognize a good idea when they see one—even if it doesn’t come from mom. The dolphins are also motivated to learn tool-based foraging innovations from social interactions with non-parental adults. This marine life mentoring has resulted in the spread of an ingenious prey capture strategy known as shelling.

By observing and imitating others, a small group of dolphins in Shark Bay have learned how to trap prey in large gastropod shells, lift the shells above water, and shake them to dislodge and devour the fishy contents. This is how they do it.

Researchers believe the dolphins may have developed the trap and shake method of foraging to adapt to environmental change. For two years following a 2011 heatwave that caused a reduction in food supply impacting their reproduction and survival, the dolphins’ shelling behavior increased by 50%. By taking advantage of opportunities to interact and learn from other adults, the Shark Bay dolphins increased their resilience to life-threatening ecosystem stressors. Who’s a super-smart, social-networking aquatic mammal!

By the way, the Shark Bay Marine Reserve is located in Useless Loop. Is there a better town name? Well, there might be, but we haven’t come across it!

If you’d like to help ensure bottlenose dolphins can keep on being their big-brained, tool-using selves, you can contribute to the mission-critical conservation of marine habitats by participating in Plastic Free July, a global movement to give up the indestructible stuff and return our oceans to their prior state of pristine. Feeling motivated to reduce your use of plastic at home, school, and work? You can get all sorts of inspiring ideas about how to cut it out from the good people at the Plastic Free Foundation.

As a powerful visual reminder of how much plastic ends up in our oceans (8 million metric tons a year!), the talented artists at Oregon’s Washed Ashore Project have created a menagerie of 80 beautiful and thought-provoking wildlife sculptures constructed from debris collected from local beaches. If you’ve ever wondered what a shark, seal, or sea turtle built from bottles, buckets, and gumboots might look like, wonder no more. You can take a peek at Washed Ashore’s current art to save the sea exhibits here.

…

Lisa S. French July 15, 2020

We’re Reindeer. We’re Here to Help.

1.5-minute read

800 Gigatons or 1.764 quadrillion pounds. That’s how much greenhouse gas (GHG) lies under the soil in the northernmost regions of our planet. No matter what metric we use, that’s quite a lot—about 174 years’ worth of annual global passenger car emissions. Keeping carbon in cold storage under the permafrost for the last 2.58 million years has worked out really well from a life-sustaining perspective. But accelerating climate change resulting from increasing CO₂ emissions is now thawing frozen soils and releasing even more carbon into the atmosphere, creating a positive feedback loop. More warming is causing more thawing, which is releasing more carbon, which is causing more warming. We hate it when that happens.

According to a recent study in Nature, climate scientists racing to develop strategies to keep global warming below 1.5-2.0°C are working on a hoofed herbivore hack to keep the perma in permafrost and prevent the additional release of GHGs from Arctic soil. Researchers from the Universities of Stockholm and Hamburg and the Russian Academy of Sciences studying the climate impacts of reindeer and bison trampling the tundra believe the movement of large populations of megafauna may have an important role to play in keeping the planet cool.

Like a fluffy down comforter, snow insulates the soil from cold Arctic air, allowing the permafrost to thaw. Herds of roaming, grazing animals compact snow, reducing its insulating effect, which helps to preserve permafrost temperatures and keep GHG’s in the ground. In two study sites in northern Sweden and Russia, introducing substantial numbers of big mammals, including reindeer, bison, horses, and yaks, resulted in a 1.9°C degree reduction on average in soil temperature during winter and spring. Researchers predict that increasing mammal populations could result in 80% of permafrost soils remaining at an average temperature below -4°C by 2100.

At current emission rates, global temperatures are projected to rise by 2-4°C by the end of the century, and the ground temperature will be above freezing in many regions. If increasing the number of hoofed herbivores traversing the frozen North can prevent the permafrost from thawing, help keep massive amounts of carbon in the ground, and prevent further warming, all we can say is walk on, ungulates.

You can learn more about the ongoing efforts to combat climate change by integrating more megafauna into Arctic ecosystems at Pleistocene Park.

…

Lisa S. French June 21, 2020

The Flower Whisperers

2-minute read

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it — Ralph Waldo Emerson

According to a remarkable and hopeful new ETH Zurich study, bumblebees experiencing pollen deprivation resulting from climate change have learned to garden as if their hives depend on it—and they do.

Global heating is creating a seasonal mismatch between flower resources and the emergence of bumblebees in spring. No flowers, no pollen, no bees. A scarcity of the pollen that bee larvae and worker bees need to survive can negatively impact reproductive success and prevent queen bees from establishing new colonies. Heatwaves and uncommonly warm temperatures have already reduced populations by 46% in North America and 17% in Europe.

The upside (we love upsides!) is that bumblebees may be developing coping strategies to adapt to our new environmental reality, and they’re actually helping flowering plants adapt along with them. The Swiss study found that brainy bumbles have adopted a hive-saving, pollen gathering workaround to coax blooms from plants weeks ahead of schedule. By cutting distinctively shaped holes in the leaves of tomato and black mustard plants, bumblebees substantially accelerated their flowering time by an average of 30 days, approximately 25 days earlier than mechanically perforated plants. When available pollen was limited, the rate of plant perforation was significantly higher and only minor when pollen was plentiful.

Researchers believe that by helping to correct the mismatch between bloom time and hive emergence, the perforating activity of these furry little problem solvers may increase the resilience of plant-pollinator interactions to the destructive impacts of global heating. Given that about eight percent of plants rely on bumblebees for pollination, including eggplants, tomatoes, blueberries, and potatoes, we’re grateful for their efforts to bee the change.

IN SOLIDARITY

Like the flower and the bumblebee, we humans are interconnected. At Favorite World Press, we believe that our shared humanity and our faith in the strength of diverse communities are more powerful than the forces that aim to divide us.

FWP and our tree-planting partner American Forests stand in solidarity with the Black community and support organizations doing essential work to achieve social justice and ensure sustainable transformation. Because the best time to help create a more equitable world, where everyone has an opportunity to flourish, is now.

You can learn more about the mission to create a fair and just future here:

Advancement Project and the Equal Justice Initiative, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Campaign Zero .

…

Lisa S. French June 6, 2020