Small water samples can find really big animals

A team of scientists used an emerging genetic tool that analyzes DNA in water samples to detect whales and dolphins in New York waters.

Called environmental DNA or eDNA, the technique searches for trace amounts of genetic material left behind by wildlife.

The scientists, from California State University, CUNY, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and Columbia University, published their results in the journal Frontiers.

The scientists say that eDNA can be used to complement other methods to locate whales and dolphins such as visual observations and acoustic monitoring, and their eDNA detections are some of the most promising to date for detecting whales and dolphins from seawater in the open ocean.

Said the study's lead author Dr. Elizabeth Alter of California State University: "Determining how cetaceans and other threatened marine animals use coastal habitats is critical to their effective conservation. By generating eDNA data in parallel with survey data, it will be possible to gain a clearer understanding of how this tool can be used in management and conservation contexts to monitor species of conservation concern over large marine ecosystems."

In addition to finding whales and dolphins, the technique detected baitfish present in the area preyed on by whales and dolphins. The authors say the technique could eventually be used to identify individual animals.

Said Dr. Howard C. Rosenbaum, Director of WCS's Ocean Giants Program/Senior Scientist NY Aquarium and a co-author of the study: "Innovation and application of new techniques, such as the possibility of using eDNA, that leads to having better information about distribution of whales, dolphins and their prey is so important today, especially where potential impacts in these habitats may be increasing human activities."

The authors say that eDNA drops to lower levels over time and that additional research is needed to better understand how factors such as behavior and oceanographic conditions contribute to the longevity of eDNA signals.

Though there are some signs of promising recovery for many whale species and populations, whales continue to face a range of modern day threats ranging from ship strikes, to entanglement with nets, to ocean noise.

The Biden-Harris administration, New York State and other states on the eastern seaboard are scaling up massive renewable energy projects to meet energy demands and help address climate change, including a wind energy auction for more than 488,000 acres in the New York Bight. There are many potential impacts from these developments to whales that the environmental community, industry, and state/federal authorities are aiming to address. WCS has been involved at state and national level dialogues as well as developing best practice guidance through the IUCN.

The use of emerging and novel techniques such as eDNA as demonstrated by the results of the current study in the NY Bight and other approaches can offer new insights as to whale presence and their prey in and around lease areas as offshore wind scales up along the eastern seaboard. More broadly, WCS increasingly uses eDNA in its conservation work, detecting critically endangered wildlife such as Swinhoe's softshell turtle, in the Bolivian Amazon, and in some of the most rugged areas on the planet including Mt. Everest.

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Materials provided by Wildlife Conservation Society. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/small-water-samples-can-find-really-big-animals/

Tiny tire particles inhibit growth of organisms in freshwater, coastal estuaries, studies find

Small particles from tires inhibited the growth and caused adverse behavioral changes in organisms found in freshwater and coastal estuary ecosystems, two new research papers from Oregon State University scientists found.

The findings are part of a continued effort by scientists to unravel the impacts of microplastics and nanoplastics on aquatic ecosystems and aquatic organisms. Tire particles are one of the most common microplastic types in aquatic ecosystems.

Harper, Brander and several other graduate students and a post-doctoral scholars in their labs, including Brittany Cunningham, Samreen Siddiqui, recently published two papers on the tire particle research in Chemosphere and the Journal of Hazardous Materials.

"The focus on microplastics and now nanoplastics is still relatively new," said Stacey Harper, an Oregon State professor who studies the environmental health and safety impacts of nanomaterials and led the research on tire particles in freshwater organisms. "We're now at the point of making policy decisions that we don't have the science for. That's why we are scrambling to supply that science."

California is at the forefront of this issue, with a statewide microplastics strategy adopted last week. Similar efforts at the federal level and potentially among other states are anticipated, said Susanne Brander, an assistant professor and ecotoxicologist at Oregon State who led the coastal study on tire particles and was also co-chair for one of the several science advisory teams that helped develop the California strategy.

Tire particles are composed of materials including synthetic rubber, filling agents, oils and other additives. The particles themselves and chemicals they leach, known as leachate, may have detrimental effects on aquatic organisms they come in contact with, the researchers note.

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The researchers cite studies that show during the lifetime of an automobile tire about 30% of its tread erodes and enters the environment. They also cite a recent study that estimated more than 1.5 million metric tons of tire wear particles flow into the environment each year in the United States.

"I feel in particular with tire particles that everyone is measuring how much is out there, but very few groups are measuring what impact they are having," Brander said. "That's really the gap we were trying to patch up here."

To do that, the Oregon State scientists exposed two model organisms in both the freshwater and estuary ecosystems to different concentrations of micro and nano tire particles and to leachate created by the breakdown of the tire particles. Microparticles are fragments less than 5 millimeters (0.20 inches) in length. Nanoparticles are so small that are not visible to the naked eye or under a simple microscope.

In the estuary ecosystem paper, led by post-doctoral scholar Samreen Siddiqui, the model organisms were Inland Silverside and mysid shrimp. Findings by the researchers included:

• Both organisms, after being exposed, had significantly altered swimming behaviors at concentrations detected in the environment, such as increased freezing, changes in positioning and total distance moved, which the researchers note could lead to an increased risk of predation and challenges for the organisms to find food in the wild.
• Both organisms had reduced growth depending on the level of exposure to micro tire particles, fish exposed to nano tire particles also had reduced growth.
• Leachates affected behavior but did not impact growth in either organism.

These findings led the researchers to conclude that even at current environmental levels of tire-related pollution, which are expected to increase, aquatic ecosystems may be experiencing negative impacts.

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In the freshwater ecosystem paper, led by graduare student Brittany Cunningham, embryonic zebrafish and the crustacean Daphnia magna were the model organisms. Among the findings:

• Both organisms experienced mortality and developmental abnormalities due to tire particle and leachate exposures.
• Tire particle leachate was the main driver of toxicity for both organisms.
• Exposure to nano tire particles enhanced toxicity in comparison to leachate alone.

These findings led the researchers to conclude that while toxicity from tire particles was observed in both organisms, overall sensitivity to tire particles differed. They believe that it is important to understand these differences to identify levels at which these pollutants become toxic. This knowledge, they note, is crucial for the creation of risk assessments, which inform policy decisions.

The researchers also mentioned several ways to limit tire particles from entering the environment. These include installing rain gardens on the sides of roads to capture tire particles, installing particle capture devices on cars, developing tires that last longer and investing in green infrastructure, such as public transit, that allows people to drive less.

The research is supported by a National Science Foundation Growing Convergence Research Big Idea grant. The grant supports the Oregon State-based Pacific Northwest Consortium of Plastics, which Harper and Brander co-lead.

Harper and Brander are based in the Oregon State College of Agricultural Sciences. Other co-authors of the papers include Bryan Harper, Sarah Hutton, John Dickens and Emily Pedersen.

#Environment | https://sciencespies.com/environment/tiny-tire-particles-inhibit-growth-of-organisms-in-freshwater-coastal-estuaries-studies-find/

These Climate Scientists Are Fed Up and Ready to Go on Strike

Sometimes, Bruce C. Glavovic feels so proud to be an environmental scientist, studying coastal planning and teaching future researchers, that it moves him to tears.

Other times, he wonders whether any of it has been enough. Scientists have proved beyond doubt that climate change is transforming the planet for the worse. Yet their work has mostly failed to spur governments to address the issue. When all the signs are telling scientists that their research is not being heard, it is tragic, Dr. Glavovic said, that they just keep producing more of it.

“We’ve had 26 Conference of the Parties meetings, for heaven’s sake,” he said, referring to the United Nations global warming summits. More scientific reports, another set of charts. “I mean, seriously, what difference is that going to make?”

It was this frustration that led Dr. Glavovic, 61, a professor at Massey University in New Zealand, and two colleagues to send a jolt recently through the normally cautious, rarefied world of environmental research. In an academic journal, they called on climate scientists to stage a mass walkout, to stop their research until nations take action on global warming.

Predictably, many researchers balked, calling the idea wrongheaded or worse — “a supernova of stupid,” as one put it on Twitter. But the article gets at questions that plenty of climate scientists have asked themselves lately: Is what we’re doing with our lives really making a difference? How can we get elected officials to act on the threats that we’ve so clearly identified? Do we become activists? Would we sacrifice our credibility as academics, our cool composure, by doing so?

Dr. Glavovic says he believes a pause on research would give his fellow researchers a chance to think, really think, about how best to use their skills in the slender window humans have left for altering the planet’s trajectory. “The clock is ticking,” he said.

Climate change has a way of making everyone feel at once very small and bothersomely large — big enough to worsen the problem, too tiny to stop it. Climate scientists devote so much of themselves to the issue that their unease can run deeper.

For scientists of many kinds, the coronavirus pandemic has fueled the sense that scientific experts and political authorities are uneasy allies at best, that distrust and misinformation have weakened society’s capacity to work toward complex collective goals.

These thoughts were percolating as Dr. Glavovic worked alongside nearly 270 other experts on the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that assesses climate research. The new report, all 3,675 pages of it, was issued on Monday and concludes that global warming is outpacing our ability to cope.

Each I.P.C.C. assessment is a huge, multiyear effort by researchers and representatives from 195 governments. Every line, every chart, is fine-tuned to ensure it is backed by evidence. The hours are long; the work is unpaid. The panel, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, has given global climate talks a crucial grounding in scientific fact. But its reports deliberately do not prescribe policies for governments to enact. They just lay out the options.

To Dr. Glavovic, the panel’s efforts made clear long ago what the world needs to do. He thinks everybody’s time and energy would be better spent making sure it gets done.

“My involvement with I.P.C.C. has been a defining feature of my life for the last five to six years; I’ve slept, drunk, eaten I.P.C.C.,” Dr. Glavovic said. “It’s been an absolute privilege.”

Still, he has decided not to take part in the panel’s next assessment. And he wants his fellow scientists to join him.

Few seem ready to do so, though many have similarly weak faith in government action. The journal Nature surveyed dozens of scientists who worked on another recent I.P.C.C. report. Sixty percent said they believed the planet would warm in this century by at least 3 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial times, much more than current international targets. A similar share said they had experienced anxiety, grief or other distress related to climate change.

As the oceans rise, forests burn and carbon dioxide levels continue their upward march, even scientists who do not want to go on strike wonder how much longer they can keep serving assoft-spoken brokers of data and evidence.

“Our first recognition must be that that doesn’t seem to work,” said Wolfgang Cramer, another author of the new I.P.C.C. report. “That doesn’t seem to be enough.”

‘An Incredibly Depressing Thought’

Climate protesters in New York City gathered to demand more action against climate change in November 2021.Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Scientists in any field want their work to have an impact. Most of them are not up against some of the most powerful political and economic forces on the planet.

Like doctors, climate researchers tend to develop “some psychological protection, some form of emotional withdrawal,” said Maria Fernanda Lemos, an I.P.C.C. author in Rio de Janeiro. “Otherwise, it would not be possible to carry out this work.”

For Iain White, a professor of environmental planning at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, a feeling of futility swept over him when he looked up the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at different points in his life.

It was about 330 parts per million in 1973, the year he was born; roughly 350 in 1988, the year the I.P.C.C. was created; and pushing 370 around the turn of the millennium.

“I came to the conclusion that it would go up every year until I retired,” Dr. White said. “It was just an incredibly depressing thought.”

Scientists do not talk enough about the emotional toll of researching planetary calamity, he said. “You do hear examples of grief, and people choosing not to have children, and all those kinds of things which you wouldn’t have really thought about 20, 30 years ago, but are now fairly mainstream.”

Timothy F. Smith, 50, a professor of sustainability at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, said he and his colleagues had long wrestled with doubts about their work: “Is it worth continuing if we’re not having the impact that we need?”

And so, in early 2020, Dr. Smith, Dr. White and Dr. Glavovic met up in the seaside town of Tairua, New Zealand. Their plan was to sketch out a joint research project. Instead, they pondered why it was so hard for any research to make a difference. They concluded that withholding that research, and halting I.P.C.C. assessments, was scientists’ best hope for prodding elected officials to act.

Mixed Messages

Tim Smith near his home in Australia.David Kelly for The New York Times

When the three professors submitted their call for a walkout to top scientific journals, there were few takers.

“None of us had ever had so many rejections,” Dr. Glavovic said. Eventually, their article was published in the journal Climate and Development.

Dr. Glavovic traces his willingness to take a stand to growing up as a white South African under apartheid, a system he came to detest. In his 20s, he risked jail time by requesting to be a conscientious objector to conscription.

Understand the Latest News on Climate Change

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Struggling to adapt. The dangers of climate change are mounting so rapidly that they could soon overwhelm the ability of both nature and humanity to adapt unless greenhouse gas emissions are quickly reduced, according to a major U.N. report. Here are five takeaways from the report.

The biggest climate case in a decade. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a dispute that could restrict or even eliminate the E.P.A.’s authority to control the pollution that is heating the planet. A decision by the court, with its conservative supermajority, could shred President Biden’s climate agenda.

A world on fire. A United Nations report has concluded that the risk of devastating wildfires around the world could increase by up to 57 percent by the end of the century, as climate change further intensifies what the authors of the document described as a “global wildfire crisis.”

Melting away. Sea ice around Antarctica has reached a record low in four decades of observations, a new analysis of satellite images shows. While warmer ocean temperatures may have played a role, the precise effect of climate change on Antarctic sea ice remains unclear.

A megadrought and rising sea levels. An intense drought in the American Southwest has become so severe that it’s now the driest 22-year period in the region in 1,200 years. Scientists are also warning that coastal sea levels in the U.S. will rise by about a foot or more on average by 2050.

“It’s a very interesting experience to be in the army and everyone else around you is carrying rifles and you’re not,” he said.

One piece of his argument is easily misunderstood. He is calling for an end to I.P.C.C. assessments not because he believes the panel has failed, but because he thinks it has been a stunning success. It has proved the links between human activity and global warming.

“We’re suggesting a moratorium on the science that simply documents the decline of human well-being and planetary health,” he said. “That science is not contributing to solutions.”

Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian of science, agreed that the panel sent a “mixed message” with its assessments. “Every time the I.P.C.C. comes out with yet another report, saying yet again that the science is unequivocal,” she said.

Well, then “why do we need another report?” she said.

Pierre Friedlingstein, a professor at the University of Exeter who worked on previous I.P.C.C. reports, said past assessments had ended with many discussions about how the next one could be better. But only the governments, not the scientists, can make major changes to the way the panel works.

“At the end of the day,” he said, “you end up with a system that looks amazingly similar to what we had before.”

A Broader Responsibility

Aditi Mukherji, a water expert and I.P.C.C. author, in Kolkata, India.Rebecca Conway for The New York Times

Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist who worked on past I.P.C.C. reports, said the science might indeed be settled on climate change and global average temperatures.

“But so what?” she said. “Nobody lives in the global average.”

In the 1980s, Dr. Solomon’s research helped lead to a sweeping agreement to restore the ozone layer. That effort succeeded, she said, because people grasped how the issue affected them personally. Similarly, she said, as scientists improve their understanding of climate change’s local and regional threats, elected leaders will feel more pressure to act.

“There is always more to learn about how to deal with climate change impacts and future risks,” said an I.P.C.C. spokesman, Andrej Mahecic.

Other researchers say high-level action on carbon emissions is not the only point. They say their responsibility is much broader.

In India, “local governments are desperately looking for data and information,” said Aditi Mukherji, an I.P.C.C. author based in Kolkata. They “are looking for scientists to tell them what municipal action can they take,” she said.

Edmond Totin, an I.P.C.C. author in Benin, said few leaders in West Africa considered climate change a burning issue, not compared with education or security. But ordinary people are hungry to know about the changes they are seeing in water supplies, crop yields and fishing patterns.

“I make more impact at the local level than the higher level,” Dr. Totin said. “I don’t even believe I make any change at the global level.” He laughed.

Whenever Debora Ley, an I.P.C.C. author in Guatemala, feels discouraged by the latest grim climate reports, she thinks of the people in villages where she has helped set up small renewable-energy systems.

“The first time they turn on a bulb and see it,” she said. “The excitement in their face.”

But there are hard days, too. “Sometimes, ice cream is the best friend,” Dr. Ley said.

Putting out their call for a strike has led Dr. Glavovic, Dr. Smith and Dr. White to think critically about their remaining working years. Really, that is all they want their fellow scientists to do, too.

“I don’t want to document decline,” Dr. White said. “I want to try and use what little time we have to bring at least a little bit of joy.”





#Environment | https://sciencespies.com/environment/these-climate-scientists-are-fed-up-and-ready-to-go-on-strike/

Social networking for fossils shows community impacts of mass extinctions

By applying an algorithm akin to what Facebook uses to make friend suggestions, researchers have identified communities of ancient life in the fossil record and tracked how their numbers changed through each of the planet's mass extinctions.

As expected, the number of communities -- a group of different species living in the same general area -- dropped during mass extinction events. But the rate at which communities disappeared did not always track with the overall loss of life and biodiversity during an extinction, a result that suggests that the ecological impacts of an extinction are not always linked with the number of species that perish.

"There have been times in our history where there have been major events that saw tremendous changes in communities, but very few species disappeared," said lead author Drew Muscente, who conducted the study when he was a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences. "And there have been events where many species had disappeared and communities and ecosystems were barely affected at all."

Muscente is now an assistant professor at Cornell College. The study was recently published in the journal Geology.

The results underscore the importance of studying communities to get a broader perspective on environmental change -- both in the past and in the present.

"We try to understand how changes in these communities lead to fundamental transformation of entire ecosystems," said coauthor Rowan Martindale, an associate professor at the Jackson School.

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Identifying communities in the fossil record is notoriously difficult. Most research on paleocommunities focuses on comparing samples and collections of fossils that have been taken from rocks of various ages and locations. And although conventional computational methods can be used to group samples into paleocommunities, they work best with relatively small datasets of only a few hundred or thousand fossil collections. Due to this limitation, the conventional methods can only be applied to data from specific regions and time periods, as opposed to the entire record.

The researchers were able to overcome these challenges and examine the entire fossil record by applying a community detection algorithm based on network analysis methods. Social media companies are known for using these sorts of methods to connect users, but they are becoming increasingly applied across a range of scientific disciplines.

According to Muscente, this study is the first time that network analysis has been applied to detect paleocommunities throughout the entire fossil record of marine animal life -- from when animal life first appeared to the current geologic era.

Matthew Clapham, a paleobiology professor at the University of California Santa Cruz who was not involved with the study, said that another advantage of the network analysis method is the emphasis on visualizing connections, rather than just the types of animals present in an ecosystem.

"It brings the analysis closer to the way that the communities actually worked because communities and interactions between species are networks," he said.

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Drawing on a database of 124,605 collections of marine animal fossils from around the world, and representing 25,749 living and extinct animal groups, or genera, the algorithm identified more than 47 million links between these samples and organized them into 3,937 distinct paleocommunities.

The study tracked the communities and biodiversity over the past 541 million years. The research showed that while mass extinction events took a toll on both, the degree of decline sometimes differed.

Some extinctions affected communities more than biodiversity. Some affected biodiversity more than communities. And some affected both about the same.

Furthermore, the researchers did not find a link between the cause of an extinction and whether it took a great toll on communities or biodiversity.

The results indicate that the larger ecological impacts of extinction are more about which species are lost rather than the number of species lost. If an environment's key players are preserved, communities can remain intact. But if too many of these players are removed, the community crumbles with it.

Muscente said he hopes that the network analysis methods first applied in this study can be improved and used to study modern ecosystems.

"I'd like to try and bridge the gap from the rock record to the present," he said.

The study's other coauthors include scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Idaho, the Carnegie Institution for Science and Harvard University.

The research was funded by the Keck Foundation, the Deep Carbon Observatory, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Carnegie Institution for Science and the National Science Foundation.

#Nature | https://sciencespies.com/nature/social-networking-for-fossils-shows-community-impacts-of-mass-extinctions/

Would Vladimir Putin really use nuclear weapons in Ukraine?

Russia's invasion of Ukraine hasn't gone to plan and has led to an economic backlash from the West. If Russian president Vladimir Putin feels backed into a corner, there is a real possibility he could use a nuclear weapon in an attempt to show strength, say analysts

Humans


| Analysis

28 February 2022

By Matthew Sparkes

Vladimir Putin may feel increasingly isolated

Russian Look Ltd. / Alamy

Nuclear conflict is a distinct but remote possibility as global tensions are ratcheted up by Russia’s faltering invasion of Ukraine, warn analysts. Russian president Vladimir Putin is in a vulnerable and unpredictable position as he contends with a lacklustre economy, increasing dissent among his citizens and, now, the potential for military defeat.

On 27 February, Putin raised Russia’s nuclear readiness system level by ordering his forces to take a “special regime of combat duty”. Patrick Bury at the University of Bath, UK, says this announcement was unusually vague, counter to the typical nuclear deterrence strategy of acting clearly and transparently as a warning to others. He and fellow academics and analysts assumed that the country would have been at level 2 of Russia’s four-level system already, given the situation in Ukraine.

But Putin’s announcement is being widely interpreted as a move from level 1 (stood down) to level 2 (ready to accept an order to fire). Bury believes we are closer to nuclear conflict now than at any point since the cold war tension of the 1980s. “Putin has poked a sleeping giant,” he says. “The West has responded massively.”

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This response included Western nations sending weapons and aid to Ukraine, while stronger-than-expected economic sanctions from around the world are piling on the pressure against Putin. If Russia’s invasion now fails, he could be removed from power or even killed in a coup, which Bury warns is a situation that backs Putin into a corner.

Bury puts the odds of a nuclear detonation as a result of this crisis at 20 per cent, but points out that it need not lead to all-out nuclear war. Instead, we could see a low-yield device used against the military in Ukraine, or even a large device detonated at sea simply as a show of force.

David Galbreath at the University of Bath says that the conflict is about more than Ukraine: it is a flexing of Russian muscles against what Putin sees as the growing threat of cooperation in the European Union and the NATO military alliance.

Galbreath says it was obvious in the build-up to the invasion that the types of personnel and weapons amassing at the border were the type one would deploy to quickly strike Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, oust Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and install a puppet leader – not those needed to occupy a country.

If this was the plan, it has already failed. And therefore we may now see the use of stronger military options that are available to Putin, such as electronic warfare that can cripple enemy surveillance and vehicles, and sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles that would prevent Ukraine from defending its airspace – currently it is still able to launch its aircraft and dogfights with Russian aircraft continue. Nuclear weapons are also a possibility, but only as a last resort, says Galbreath.

“In terms of military action, I think what we’ve seen so far is fairly limited. I think they’re going to get heavy next. And I think we need to prepare for far worse casualties,” says Kenton White at the University of Reading, UK.

White points to Russia’s military tactic of maskirovka, or disinformation, which the country has already used during the invasion. In an extreme case, White says this could stretch to a false-flag operation, such as the detonation of a small nuclear bomb outside Ukraine’s border, which is blamed on NATO.

“There’s a lot of talk about rationality of action when you’re discussing nuclear deterrence,” says White. “Well, President Putin has a rationality all of his own.”

More on these topics:

#Humans | https://sciencespies.com/humans/would-vladimir-putin-really-use-nuclear-weapons-in-ukraine/

They Want to Break T. Rex Into 3 Species. Paleontologists Aren’t Pleased.

The premise, put forth in a new paper, highlights an assortment of tensions in dinosaur paleontology, including how subjective the naming of species can be.

Tyrannosaurus rex is the most iconic dinosaur. Its skeletons hold pride of place in museums around the world, and sell for millions of dollars at auction — and a bounty of relatively complete specimens have made it the most thoroughly studied dinosaur in the world.

But in a new paper published Tuesday in Evolutionary Biology, three researchers argue that the animal we currently call Tyrannosaurus rex should actually be split into three separate species, with T. rex being joined by two cousins they name Tyrannosaurus imperator, or the emperor, and Tyrannosaurus regina, the queen.

“This paper is likely to rock the paleo community, and the public that is so used to good old T. rex,” said Gregory Paul, an independent paleontologist and paleoartist and author on the paper.

Tyrannosaur experts largely disagree. Thomas Carr, a paleontologist at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis., calls the evidence for multiple species “vanishingly weak.” Another paleontologist removed himself as an author of the paper before it moved to publication. And curators at museums with Tyrannosaurus specimens that would be affected by these reclassifications say they aren’t going to rename anything based on the proposal.

But even if children’s imaginations never end up filled with the sharp teeth and tiny arms of three types of Tyrannosaurus, the premise put forward by Mr. Paul and his colleagues highlights an assortment of tensions in dinosaur paleontology. One is that naming dinosaur species is a subjective process, and each new species description is more of an argument than a declaration. Some researchers think that the idea of multiple Tyrannosaurus species has merit but say that splitting apart a species as famous and well-studied as Tyrannosaurus rex requires a high standard of evidence.

Whether Mr. Paul is ultimately proved right, he wouldn’t be the first researcher unaffiliated with formal institutions to shake up a consensus in the field — or the first to potentially bite off more than he can chew.

The Name Game

A portion of a 40-foot T. rex skeleton nicknamed “Stan,” which was discovered in 1987 on privately owned land in the Hell Creek Formation.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Tyrannosaurus rex name has been remarkably stable for decades.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Scientific names are split between genus and species. Tyrannosaurus is a genus, which is theoretically capable of holding multiple species. As yet, it has only one: Tyrannosaurus rex.

This might sound simple, says David Hone, a paleontologist at Queen Mary University of London.But there’s actually no universally consistent agreement for what constitutes a species. To separate them in living animals, scientists generally rely on anatomy — the color of a bird’s feathers or the specific traits of bones — as well as genetic evidence. But separate species can and do interbreed, and animals of the same species at different ends of a very large geographic range can vary a startling amount from one another.

In the absence of prehistoric DNA, dinosaur paleontologists must rely on the anatomical details of fossilized bone — which can be found at different growth stages or varying levels of completeness. This can lead to headaches, like scientists assigning multiple names to the same animal — as with Brontosaurus, which was junked for more than a century before the name was revived in 2015.

But Tyrannosaurus rex has been a remarkably stable name. Discovered in 1902, the animal is the last and largest of the many, smaller tyrannosaurs that preceded it in the dinosaur era. Its fossils have been found primarily in the Hell Creek Formation, a band of 66-million-year-old rocks that records the last million years of the dinosaurs’ reign and is found in parts of Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota and North Dakota.

Long known from only two decent specimens, Mr. Paul said, Tyrannosaurus rex largely sailed through the decades without major taxonomic revisions. But as dinosaur fossil collecting boomed in the 1990s, newly found T. rex skeletons trickled into museums. Their proportions showed a remarkable amount of individual variation, and some researchers argued that they fell into two groups: the bulky “robust” form, and the relatively svelte “graciles.” Some scientists argued it was evidence of major differences between females and males of the species, said Thomas Holtz, a paleontologist at the University of Maryland who specializes in tyrannosaurs. Others said it was simply an unusual degree of individual variation. But some researchers toyed with a third possibility: that Tyrannosaurus was a genus with more than one species.

Ranchers at the site of where the “Wankel T. rex,” also known as the “Nation’s T. rex,” was excavated, in the Fort Peck Reservoir in Montana.Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post via Getty Images

One of those researchers was Mr. Paul. While Mr. Paul lacks a formal degree in paleontology, he has a long history in the field, and has written or been a co-author of over 30 scientific papers. He has proposed new genera and species for other dinosaurs, too. An argument he made about Brachiosaurus was broadly embraced. Another one he made about Iguanodonwasn’t. His work also influenced Michael Crichton, the author of the novel “Jurassic Park,” as well as the makers of the movie based on it.

In 2010, Mr. Paul and others began working on the question of T. rex’s identity. They gathered anatomical measurements from 38 existing specimens, and assessed them according to a pair of anatomical traits: the relative proportions of the femur and the presence — or absence — of two sets of chisel-like front teeth in their lower jaws.

They also compared the tyrannosaurus specimens — which were collected from across North America — to specimens of dinosaurs that most likely belonged to one species, such as the 14 Allosaurus specimens collected from the University of Utah’s Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry. The T. rexes, they said, showed significantly wider variation in body proportions, suggesting they might belong to multiple species.

They found some of the specimens difficult to classify. But 26 seemed to group into three types, Mr. Paul said: one robust form from early in the Hell Creek with two sets of incisors in its lower jaws, and a robust and gracile form from later with only one incisor set.

These three forms, Mr. Paul and his colleagues concluded, were probably different enough from one another — and appeared over a sufficient length of time — to warrant separate names. Therefore, the earliest, bulky Tyrannosaurus to show up in the Hell Creek received the name Tyrannosaurus imperator (“emperor tyrant lizard”), which then — over the course of one million to two million years — split into the robust Tyrannosaurus rex and the newly named, comparatively slender Tyrannosaurus regina (tyrant lizard queen).

That proposed evolutionary trajectory — from one tank-like population to another relatively lithe one — matches ecosystems earlier in the Cretaceous period that were dominated by Tyrannosaurus relatives, Mr. Paul said. In that period, bruisers like Daspletosaurus coexisted with long-legged hunters such as Gorgosaurus.

According to Dr. Holtz, such an idea is entirely plausible — but proving it will require support from future finds.

“It’s a testable hypothesis, as any statement of species identity should be,” Dr. Holtz said. “With additional new specimens, we can see if specimens they didn’t include or we haven’t found yet are consistent with this suggestion, or if they reject it.”

While Dr. Holtz felt the authors’ case would be more convincing if the different species they describe were organized more chronologically in specific rock layers, he noted that the Hell Creek Formation contains other examples of species divergence. Other fossils found there led to a general agreement that there was more than one species of triceratops, Dr. Holtz said. And there’s a possibility that the hadrosaurs and dome-headed Pachycephalosaurus found at the top of the formation differ significantly from those at the bottom.

“At the same time, in the same place, the same size classes of organisms are going through a succession of species,” Dr. Holtz said. “It’s not inconceivable that Tyrannosaurus did so as well.”

Bones to Pick

A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, called Trix, at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Thomas Holtz, a paleontologist at the University of Maryland said the argument that T. rex was three species was plausible but that proving it would require further evidence.Bart Maat/EPA, via Shutterstock

Others took a less positive stance.

A major problem with the study is that the femur proportions of all three proposed species overlap rather than showing clear separations, said Jingmai O’Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago. The same is true of the proposed periods of time in which they existed. To her, that suggests a continuous spectrum of change, arbitrarily split into three groups — not the distinct differences you’d expect to see in three species.

“The diagnoses provided for each species are incredibly vague, using words like ‘usually’ and ‘generally,’” Dr. O’Connor said. “Even in well-preserved specimens, the authors are unable to refer them to a specific species.”

The proposed species groupings also don’t necessarily match existing anatomical data, Dr. Carr of Carthage College said. After reading the study, Dr. Carr compared its conclusions to a massive analysis of T. rex he performed in 2020 — which included every existing Tyrannosaurus specimen. He found no significant correlation between the 2020 data and the types Mr. Paul’s team described.

“Four of those specimens have perfect skulls!” Dr. Carr said. “They should be able to tell species apart if they have perfect skulls, and they can’t do it.”

Similar concerns led Philip Currie, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta who had been an author on Mr. Paul’s paper, to take his name off the project.

“I think the paper is great in that it shows that morphological changes were taking place in Tyrannosaurus over the years that it existed,” Dr. Currie wrote in an email. “I am pretty conservative, so my preference was not to be directly involved in setting up even more species.”

Part of the paper’s proposed impact would fall on museum collections. According to the new proposal, Sue, the Field Museum’s nearly complete T. rex, is now the holotype — the specimen that anchors a species name — of Tyrannosaurus imperator. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s skeleton, nicknamed “the Nation’s T. rex,” has been anointed the holotype for Tyrannosaurus regina.

Mr. Paul said he hoped museums would use the debate around his conclusions as an opportunity to educate the public about how science works. But he says they can’t just ignore it — and he promises to raise a fuss if they try.

The Field Museum won’t be changing the labels on Sue anytime soon, however. “Modifications to exhibit texts are only made after new hypotheses have been vetted and widely accepted by the scientific community,” Dr. O’Connor said. “The new hypothesis regarding Tyrannosaurus diversity is very poorly justified and is unlikely to make it through this rigorous process.”

Ironically, Dr. Holtz said, even if everyone agreed with the team’s proposal, at least one of Mr. Paul’s proposed names might prove to be dead in the water because it crashes into another long-running battle in Tyrannosaurus taxonomy: the identity of Nanotyrannus lancensis, an animal named in 1946 from relatively early in the Hell Creek. Some researchers have argued it represents a separate genus of pygmy tyrannosaur. But most consider it a juvenile Tyrannosaurus.

Dr. Holtz says that because the “lancensis” species name has been around longer, it would take precedence over Tyrannosaurus imperator. “It’s going to be Tyrannosaurus lancensis,” he said.

Mr. Paul argues, however, that the new species names are entirely reasonable, and that many dinosaur species are named based on significantly less evidence. “If it had been a paper about putting another dinosaur into different species, nobody would really care,” he said. “This is T. rex, so people are getting uptight about it.”

The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry in Cleveland, Utah. In exploring the question of T. rex’s identity, authors of the paper compared T. rex specimens with 14 Allosaurus specimens housed at the quarry. Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

He also said that if his team had simply published an argument for splitting Tyrannosaurus up without naming the newly created animals, someone else might have been able to swoop in and do so, “which would have been very irritating.”

He added, “I wasn’t going to let that happen, so we went ahead and named them.”

Under normal circumstances, Dr. Hone said, pointing out a few different anatomical traits and correlating them with different rock layers could make a decent case for naming new species. But splitting up T. rex — “the most intensively studied and best-known dinosaur on earth” — requires a higher standard.

That’s partly because debates over dinosaur taxonomy can also linger a surprisingly long time in popular culture: In Mr. Paul’s 1998 book, “Predatory Dinosaurs of the World,” he proposed uniting the large raptor Deinonychus with its smaller Mongolian cousin velociraptor. The suggestion didn’t stick — except in the novel “Jurassic Park” and its subsequent films, which feature supersized velociraptors to this day.

“If you’ve got it wrong, it’ll be decades of public confusion and argument,” Dr. Hone said, which often leads to suggestions that all taxonomic divisions are arbitrary and beloved species don’t exist. Worse, it’ll be centered on T. rex, the most famous dinosaur around.

“That’s not the kind of thing you should be doing based on femur robusticity and the presence or absence of a tooth,” Dr. Hone added. “If you’re going to shoot for the king, don’t miss.”

The bottom line is that Mr. Paul and his team are taking advantage of the fact that species concepts in dinosaur paleontology are best summarized by a shrug, said Leonard Finkelman, who studies the philosophy of paleontology at Linfield University in Oregon. Until dinosaur paleontologists work out a consistent standard for the minimum anatomical differences it takes to name a new species, he says, controversies like this one will keep happening.

On the other hand, provocative proposals can have value in and of themselves, Dr. Finkelman said. Sometimes an idea that at first seems poorly supported can be upheld by future finds. And when it isn’t, such ideas still prompt researchers to revisit old work in light of new ideas — which is one way science can progress.

“Whether it makes a visible contribution now, forcing scientists to go back and look at their old data is always going to be a useful exercise,” Dr. Finkelman said.

And that is basically what Mr. Paul wants.

“I’m aware that there could be a lot of people who aren’t going to be happy about this,” he said. “And my response to them is: Publish a refutation.”

#News | https://sciencespies.com/news/they-want-to-break-t-rex-into-3-species-paleontologists-arent-pleased/

5 Takeaways From the U.N. Report on Climate Hazards

Global warming is affecting every part of the planet. Humans should have started preparing yesterday.

A body of experts convened by the United Nations has put out its most comprehensive look to date at how climate change is affecting our homes, health, livelihoods and infrastructure, as well as the natural systems upon which they all depend.

The picture is not a cheery one. The report, which was approved by 195 governments, shows how widespread and severe the impacts of human-caused global warming are becoming worldwide — and how hard it will be for societies and ecosystems to manage if nations do not bring greenhouse gas emissions down sharply.

Read complete coverage of the I.P.C.C. report.

“Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action,” the report says, “will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”

Here are five main findings:

Climate hazards have worsened significantly in the past decade.

This group of experts, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, put out its last big survey of the impacts of climate change in 2014. (It put out a separate report last year on the physical drivers of climate change.) Back in 2014, its report said there was “limited evidence” that nations needed more money to cope with the dangers than was being allocated. Global warming was having a “relatively small” effect on human health, the panel’s report said, compared with other stressors.

Eight years later, it is a different story.

The new report finds that climate change is not only adding to ecological threats such as wildfires, heat waves and rising sea levels, it is also displacing people from their homes and jeopardizing food and water supplies. It is harming people’s physical and mental health, with increasing incidence of food and waterborne illness, respiratory distress from wildfire smoke and trauma from natural disasters. And the funding shortfall for dealing with all this is “widening,” the new report says.

If warming isn’t slowed, the dangers will multiply.

Not so long ago, scientists thought the planet might be spared the most damaging effects of climate change if global warming didn’t exceed 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above 19th century temperatures.

Now it is clear that many of those harms will appear if warming surpasses 1.5 degrees Celsius, as is likely within the next few decades. (We’re at roughly 1.1 degrees now.) And even if we cross 1.5 degrees but temperatures are brought back down later, severe and irreversible damage could still result, the new report says.

Past 1.5 degrees of warming, coastal, mountain and Arctic regions could suffer irreparably, the report says. Increased wildfires, mass die-offs of trees, drying of bogs and thawing of permafrost could release more carbon dioxide into the air, making it even harder to arrest global warming.

If temperatures continue rising beyond that, all of these dangers intensify, and the economic damage worldwide increases “non-linearly,” according to the report. Many more animal species become likely to go extinct. Mosquitoes would expand their range northward, putting additional billions of people at risk for dengue fever by the end of the century, the report says.

Societies have not done enough to adapt and stay safe.

The report acknowledges some success in adjusting to these new hazards, such as better early warning systems for disasters. Mostly, though, humanity’s efforts have been “fragmented” and “incremental,” it says, and sometimes counterproductive.

Societies have built sea walls to defend against rising tides, but that often pushes flood risks down shore. They have worked to put out wildfires, but some of those blazes have ecological benefits.

“Transformational” changes are needed to safeguard human well-being, the report says, including stronger health and sanitation systems, more robust food supply chains, more resilient electricity grids and more forward-looking urban planning.

Icebergs that broke off of the melting Breidamerkurjokull glacier, seen in the distance, near Hof, Iceland.Sean Gallup/Getty Images

As warming continues, it will become harder and harder to cope.

As global temperatures have risen, ecosystems such as coral reefs, wetlands, rainforests and polar regions are running up against limits to how much they can adjust, the report says.

Understand the Latest News on Climate Change

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Struggling to adapt. The dangers of climate change are mounting so rapidly that they could soon overwhelm the ability of both nature and humanity to adapt unless greenhouse gas emissions are quickly reduced, according to a major U.N. report. Here are five takeaways from the report.

The biggest climate case in a decade. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a dispute that could restrict or even eliminate the E.P.A.’s authority to control the pollution that is heating the planet. A decision by the court, with its conservative supermajority, could shred President Biden’s climate agenda.

A world on fire. A United Nations report has concluded that the risk of devastating wildfires around the world could increase by up to 57 percent by the end of the century, as climate change further intensifies what the authors of the document described as a “global wildfire crisis.”

Melting away. Sea ice around Antarctica has reached a record low in four decades of observations, a new analysis of satellite images shows. While warmer ocean temperatures may have played a role, the precise effect of climate change on Antarctic sea ice remains unclear.

A megadrought and rising sea levels. An intense drought in the American Southwest has become so severe that it’s now the driest 22-year period in the region in 1,200 years. Scientists are also warning that coastal sea levels in the U.S. will rise by about a foot or more on average by 2050.

For some nations, the costs of maintaining people’s health, safety and well-being are already prohibitive, according to the report. And as warming continues, measures that are effective today for protecting water supplies, boosting agriculture and defending against climate-related harms will lose their potency. New crop varieties can be developed to withstand heat and drought, for instance, but only by so much.

The report suggests that communities try to work with nature rather than against it — reviving wetlands to defend against catastrophic floods, increasing tree cover in cities to cool them — though even this is effective only to a point.

Poor countries face much bigger challenges than rich ones.

Developing countries not only have fewer resources for dealing with climate shocks. They are also more vulnerable: Their infrastructure is often inadequate, their social safety nets are weaker and their people’s livelihoods depend more on the natural world. Between 2010 and 2020, floods, droughts and storms killed 15 times as many people in developing nations in Africa, Asia and elsewhere than in the wealthiest countries, the report found.

Even within rich countries, there are huge disparities in exposure to these risks among different groups of people. In all, 3.3 billion to 3.6 billion people — nearly half of humankind — are “highly vulnerable” to climate change today, the report says.

#Environment | https://sciencespies.com/environment/5-takeaways-from-the-u-n-report-on-climate-hazards/