Author: Futurity (National Geo)

Researchers have diagnosed 345 former NFL players with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) out of 376 former players studied, or 91.7%.

Among those diagnosed in the last year are two former players who once represented the teams paired in this Sunday’s Super Bowl LVII matchup—former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Rick Arrington, who played three seasons for the Eagles from 1970-73, and former Kansas City Chiefs defensive tackle Ed Lothamer, who played for the Chiefs in the very first Super Bowl and was a member of their winning team in Super Bowl IV.

For comparison, a 2018 Boston University study of 164 brains of men and women donated to the Framingham Heart Study found that only 1 of 164 (0.6%) had CTE. The lone CTE case was a former college football player. The extremely low population rate of CTE is in line with similar studies from brain banks in Austria, Australia, and Brazil.

The NFL player data should not be interpreted to suggest that 91.7% of all current and former NFL players have CTE, as brain bank samples are subject to selection biases. The prevalence of CTE among NFL players is unknown as CTE can only be definitively diagnosed after death. Repetitive head impacts appear to be the chief risk factor for CTE, which is characterized by misfolded tau protein that is unlike changes observed from aging, Alzheimer’s disease, or any other brain disease.

“While the most tragic outcomes in individuals with CTE grab headlines, we want to remind people at risk for CTE that those experiences are in the minority,” says Ann McKee, director of the Boston University CTE Center and chief of neuropathology at VA Boston Healthcare System. “Your symptoms, whether or not they are related to CTE, likely can be treated, and you should seek medical care. Our clinical team has had success treating former football players with mid-life mental health and other symptoms.”

McKee and her team are inviting former athletes, including women, to participate in research studies designed to learn how to diagnose and treat CTE. The BU CTE Center is collaborating with its education and advocacy partner the Concussion Legacy Foundation (CLF) to recruit former football players and other contact sport athletes to five active clinical studies.

One of the studies, Project S.A.V.E., is recruiting men and women ages 50 or older who played 5+ years of a contact sport, including American football, ice hockey, soccer, lacrosse, boxing, full contact martial arts, rugby, and wrestling.

S.A.V.E. stands for Study of Axonal and Vascular Effects from repetitive head impacts. The major goal is to determine how repeated head impacts from playing contact sports can lead to long-term thinking, memory, and mood problems. The results could highlight strategies to treat and prevent symptoms associated with head impacts from contact sports. To learn more about Project S.A.V.E. and four other studies enrolling participants, click here. To sign up for future clinical studies, enroll in the CLF research registry.

In addition, patients and families who believe they or a loved one has symptoms that may be related to prior concussions or CTE are encouraged to reach out to the CLF HelpLine, which provides referrals to doctors and care providers, educational resources, one-on-one peer support, and monthly online support groups.

“I miss my hero dearly,” says Jill Arrington, Rick Arrington’s daughter and former CBS/FOX/ESPN sideline reporter. “It pains me to know his life was cut short by the sport he loved most. As a brain donor, part of his legacy is in this research, and I want all former football players to know how important it is to contribute and sign-up for studies so Boston University CTE Center researchers and their collaborators around the world can learn how to treat, and one day cure, the disease that devastated our family.”

Research on CTE has advanced considerably over the past five years, and the BU CTE Center soon will publish its 182nd study on CTE. In part because of advances in research on CTE, in October 2022 the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), updated their position on what causes CTE: “CTE is a delayed neurodegenerative disorder that was initially identified in postmortem brains and, research-to-date suggests, is caused in part by repeated traumatic brain injuries.”

“We’d like to thank our 1,330 donor families for teaching us what we now know about CTE, and our team and collaborators around the world working to advance diagnostics and treatments for CTE,” McKee says.

Source: Boston University

Diversity in bird traits has remained relatively stable over the past million years, research finds.

A new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences uses genetic data from over 250 bird species to investigate patterns of trait diversity over the distant past and under a previous period of dramatic global climate warming.

Ryan Germain and professor David Nogués Bravo of the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate at the University of Copenhagen and colleagues identify the combination of morphological, ecological, and reproductive traits associated with long-term population declines. They also identify the trait-sets most associated with sensitivity to warming climate conditions.

Stopping the decline of global biodiversity is one of society’s most pressing challenges, but we often have a limited understanding of which species are likely to be most sensitive to population declines under environmental pressures such as climate change.

One reason for this knowledge gap is that many studies investigating such declines are conducted over a few years or decades, and often in a single geographic area. While informative for climate responses over shorter time scales, we still lack insight into biodiversity responses over longer periods and before the widespread effects of humans on the planet.

Using data collected as part of an international effort to sequence the genomes of all of the world’s birds, this study constructed genetic “log books” of changes in population size for 263 species over the past million years.

Combining this information with trait data (such as body size, migration strategy, and reproductive rate) meticulously collected from thousands of wild birds and museum specimens, this study identified the trait combinations representing species that have undergone the largest population expansions and declines over this period of the Earth’s history. This work took place as part of project DEMOCHANGE, which the Independent Research Fund Denmark funded.

Results from the study indicate that species with lower ability to disperse and/or migrate have declined substantially over the past.

Million years and are less abundant during more recent periods than they were in the more distant past.

Species most sensitive to population increases or decreases during a period of intense climate warming around 150-120 thousand years ago had very similar trait combinations, suggesting that such “redundant” trait sets might help maintain the stability of ecosystems under such periods of intense environmental change.

“These types of data offer us an amazing peek into the histories of different bird species, particularly during periods of drastic global environmental change,” says Germain, lead author of the study.

“By combining these estimates of past population sizes that we get from bird DNA with the massive effort of assembling trait data for each species, we can start to understand what types of species groups are most sensitive to the effects that we’re having on the planet.”

Source: University of Copenhagen

Babies who are 6 to 9 months can form memories of masked faces and recognize those faces when they’re unmasked.

The new study should allay concerns of many parents and childhood experts who worry about possible developmental harm from widespread face-masking during the pandemic.

For the study Michaela DeBolt, a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology, and Lisa Oakes, a professor in the psychology department and at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, used eye tracking to study how masks influence infants’ facial recognition.

They showed 58 babies, each seated on a parent’s lap or in a highchair, pairs of masked and unmasked women’s faces on a computer screen, while cameras recorded where they looked. Because babies linger longer over unfamiliar images, the researchers could derive which faces they recognized, DeBolt says.

The testing took place at the Infant Cognition Lab at the Center for Mind and Brain in Davis, California, from late December 2021 to late March 2022, during a statewide mask mandate and the arrival of the coronavirus Omicron variant.

“When babies learned a masked face, and then they saw that face again unmasked, they recognized it,” DeBolt says.

However, when the order was reversed, babies did not show strong recognition of masked faces that they first saw unmasked. DeBolt says that was similar to her own experience of not instantly recognizing a friend who was wearing a face mask.

Learning faces is central to how babies learn to talk, perceive emotions, develop relationships with their caregivers, and explore their environment, Oakes says. “So people were very worried about face masks and the effect they would have on how infants are learning about human faces.”

Oakes, an expert on cognitive development in infancy, says the study highlights a remarkable ability of babies to adapt. “I think that it should be very reassuring to parents in general,” she says. “Babies all over the world develop and thrive.

“There are so many variations in babies’ everyday lived experience,” she adds. “As long as they are well cared for and fed and they get love and attention, they thrive. We can get into a mode where we think the way we do things is the best way to do things and that anything different is going to be a problem. And that’s clearly not the case.”

The study appears in a special issue of the journal Infancy, which focused on the impact of COVID-19 on infant development.

Source: UC Davis

The standard understanding of oxytocin, colloquially known as the “love hormone,” may be all wrong.

Researchers report surprising results from a study that turns a dogma concerning the biology of friendliness, romantic attachment, and parental probity on its head.

They found that stifling the activity of oxytocin in prairie voles doesn’t change these rodents’ behavior—they remain the monogamous, protective parents they’ve always been.

“As you can imagine, this is huge,” says Nirao Shah, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Long considered important in mammalian pair bonding and good parenting, oxytocin has been stewarded into numerous clinical trials on the assumption that, administered as a drug, it might encourage sociability in people with conditions such as schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder.

The new study in Neuron seriously challenges that assumption.

Oxytocin signaling

Hormones are chemical messengers that influence the way cells act. (And multi-celled organisms such as humans are, after all, composed of cells.) Hormones circulate throughout the body doing various things from regulating sugar uptake and sodium retention to sex drive and the menstrual cycle. In every case, they work by latching on to molecular receptors.

Different hormones latch on to different receptors. Some cells have receptors for hormone A or hormone B; others don’t. A cell without a matching receptor for a given hormone has no way of knowing a hormone is in the neighborhood, much less which one it is. So, it won’t respond to that hormone.

Oxytocin, too, is understood to act by binding to its own dedicated receptor, a cell-surface protein that abounds in distinct structures in the brain.

Previous studies of oxytocin’s activity have largely relied on drugs that block or mimic the molecule’s binding to its receptor. But drugs can be notoriously imprecise in space and time, Shah says. They can diffuse to areas unrelated to the one under study, and they can persist in a tissue or on a cell surface for longer than scientists intend, producing a spurious result. And they can trip off, or inhibit, activities in cells that weren’t meant to be part of the experiment. They’re never 100% perfect at mimicking the action of the substance they’re supposed to mirror.

“We were curious about whether oxytocin signaling in fact mediated all the various aspects of social attachment and other behaviors attributed to it, because most of the work had been done with pharmacological agents,” Shah says.

He and his colleagues turned to a more meticulous genetic technology. They used CRISPR—an extremely precise molecular editing technique used to snip out stretches of DNA—to delete the gene for the oxytocin receptor in prairie voles.

Prairie vole families

Not all that many animals are doting parents, mind you. (Scorpions sometimes eat their young.) And very few are monogamous. But as a species, prairie voles serve as the ultimate commercial for lifetime marriage and nuclear families. Couples, once bonded, stick together for the long run. They huddle over their pups to keep them warm, and they retrieve any of their offspring who wander too far from the nest and into harm’s way. Plus, these fuzzy, nuzzling natives of the US Midwest are quite cute.

The investigators’ experiments showed that long after mating, pairs of voles that lacked oxytocin receptors continued to hang out together. Not only that, but they displayed outright aggression toward opposite-sexed strangers of the same species—the opposite of what would be expected of a non-monogamous animal of any species. Moms happily nursed their newborns. Dads chipped in, helping keep the pups warm, clean, and close by.

In short, prairie voles whose oxytocin receptors are non-existent still exhibit monogamous behavior and conscientious co-parenting. Apparently, oxytocin signaling through its receptor isn’t required for this loving behavior, as has been assumed, Shah says.

In fact, no result from the study—which was 15 years in the making—indicated a critical role for the oxytocin receptor in pro-social behavior (at least, not in prairie voles) or, by extension, for oxytocin.

Either oxytocin just plain isn’t essential to the cuddly camaraderie long attributed to it, or maybe in the total absence of this receptor, compensatory brain circuitry arose in early development to step up and take on pair-bonding and parenting responsibilities.

Or could it be that this hallowed hormone is two-timing its acknowledged receptor via covert liaisons with some mysterious, as-yet-unidentified receptor hiding in plain sight?

It’s also possible that some other, more relevant biological pathway—perhaps involving another hormone such as vasopressin, which is structurally and physiologically similar to oxytocin—may be underlying all these pro-social effects attributed to oxytocin.

In any case, the study’s findings may explain why several clinical trials of oxytocin as a treatment for alleviating social symptoms of autism or schizophrenia have generated mixed or downright disappointing results in the past year or so, Shah suggests.

“It looks as though people may have been barking up the wrong tree,” he says.

Source: Stanford University

People in highly walkable neighborhoods are more likely to engage in adequate physical activity, walk near their home, and have a lower body mass index, according to a new study.

Three out of four adults do not meet the recommended levels of physical activity, which the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines as at least 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity each week.

As obesity and related chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease, and diabetes continue to rise in the US, the study in the journal Obesity examined perceived neighborhood walkability, physical activity, and obesity among adults in the US. Lower body mass index (BMI) is an established indicator of obesity.

Previous studies have linked walkability with increased physical activity and lower obesity rates, but this study is the first to examine this relationship on a national level.

Notably, the findings revealed that the link between perceived walkability and physical activity differed by race and ethnicity. Black, Hispanic, and Asian residents were less likely to engage in physical activity or walk near their home, despite a greater proportion of residents of color living in high-walkability neighborhoods, compared to white residents.

These racial inequities in physical activity reflect persistent inequitable neighborhood conditions borne from systemic racism and policies that have created barriers for many communities of color to embrace health-protective behaviors, the researchers say.

“In cities and counties across the US, the legacy of racial residential segregation and policies like redlining resulted in poorer built physical activity environments, characterized by decreased walkability, street connectivity, and green space, and increased pollution that disproportionately impact communities of color,” says lead author Monica Wang, associate professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health.

“We’re continuing to see the effects of structural racism on physical activity and obesity risk in the data today.”

Wang and colleagues used demographic and health-related data from a nationally representative survey that gathers information on illness, disability, chronic impairments, health insurance, health care access, and health services use in 2020, among US adults ages 18 and older.

They found that adults who live in walkable neighborhoods were 1.5 times more likely to engage in adequate levels of physical activity, and 0.76 times less likely to have obesity, compared to adults living in neighborhoods with low walkability.

However, the team found that the association between perceived walkability and BMI levels differed among certain racial/ethnic groups. Among white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian participants, BMI levels decreased as their perception of their neighborhood walkability increased.

But among American Indian/Alaska Native and multiracial/other-race adults, BMI levels increased as perceptions of neighborhood walkability increased.

“While individuals may perceive their neighborhoods to be walkable, it may not be safe, desirable, or normative to walk in these communities,” Wang says. “This is particularly relevant for communities who have been displaced, whether historically by force or through gentrification.

“This suggests that a combination of approaches—such as improving pedestrian and public transit infrastructure, implementing policies that slow traffic, enhancing park quality, and community programming—are needed to promote walkability and well-being.”

Marie-Rachelle Narcisse, assistant professor and senior data analyst at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences is the study’s corresponding author. T Pearl McElfish, director of research at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences-Northwest is the study’s senior author.

Source: Boston University

Researchers report the ability to control two quantum light sources rather than one.

For years, researchers around the world have strived to develop stable quantum light sources and achieve the phenomenon known as quantum mechanical entanglement—a phenomenon, with nearly sci-fi-like properties, where two light sources can affect each other instantly and potentially across large geographic distances. Entanglement is the very basis of quantum networks and central to the development of an efficient quantum computer.

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute report the feat in the journal Science. According to professor Peter Lodahl, it is a crucial step in the effort to take the development of quantum technology to the next level and to “quantize” computers, encryption, and the internet.

“We can now control two quantum light sources and connect them to each other. It might not sound like much, but it’s a major advancement and builds upon the past 20 years of work. By doing so, we’ve revealed the key to scaling up the technology, which is crucial for the most ground-breaking of quantum hardware applications,” says Lodahl.

The magic all happens in a so-called nanochip not much larger than the diameter of a human hair.

Lodahl’s group has only been able to control one light source until now because light sources are extraordinarily sensitive to outside “noise,” making them very difficult to copy. In their new result, the research group succeeded in creating two identical quantum light sources rather than just one.

“Entanglement means that by controlling one light source, you immediately affect the other. This makes it possible to create a whole network of entangled quantum light sources, all of which interact with one another, and which you can get to perform quantum bit operations in the same way as bits in a regular computer, only much more powerfully,” explains postdoc Alexey Tiranov, the article’s lead author.

This is because a quantum bit can be both a 1 and 0 at the same time, which results in processing power that is unattainable using today’s computer technology. According to Lodahl, just 100 photons emitted from a single quantum light source will contain more information than the world’s largest supercomputer can process.

By using 20-30 entangled quantum light sources, there is the potential to build a universal error-corrected quantum computer—the ultimate “holy grail” for quantum technology, that large IT companies are now pumping many billions into.

With the new research breakthrough, the fundamental quantum physics research is now in place. Now it’s time for others to take the researchers’ work and use it in their quests to deploy quantum physics in a range of technologies.

“It is too expensive for a university to build a setup where we control 15-20 quantum light sources. So, now that we have contributed to understanding the fundamental quantum physics and taken the first step along the way, scaling up further is very much a technological task,” says Lodahl.

The research took place at the Danish National Research Foundation’s “Center of Excellence for Hybrid Quantum Networks (Hy-Q)” and is a collaboration with the Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

Source: University of Copenhagen

Astronomers have discovered a galactic table for two—a pair of unusually close black holes that are feeding together after their respective galaxies collided.

The finding could have a profound impact on our understanding of later-stage galaxy mergers and suggests that the phenomenon of side-by-side black holes occurring during a merger may be more common than previously known.

“Relatively few dual black holes like this have ever been confirmed,” says Meg Urry, professor of physics and astronomy at Yale University and director of the Yale Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics. “This pair has the closest separation yet measured, only about 750 light years.”

Urry, part of the international research team that made the discovery, is coauthor of the new study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and presented at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle on January 9.

A considerable body of research exists on the early phases of galactic mergers, which occur when gravity slowly draws two or more galaxies together. However, relatively little is known about the later stages. A key component in such mergers is the behavior of black holes—areas of space that have intense gravity and can grow by gobbling up gas and dust from their immediate surroundings.

For the study, astronomers enlisted a variety of powerful instruments to observe the late-stage merger of the galaxy UGC4211, located 500 million light years from Earth in the constellation Cancer. Using multiple instruments enabled researchers to observe the side-by-side black holes in different wavelengths and gather a more complete picture of the phenomenon.

Urry contributed data from the W.M. Keck Observatory’s OSIRIS near-infrared field spectrograph in Hawaii; Yale has maintained a years-long association with Keck that has yielded significant data.

“It’s super important that we can make these kinds of observations with Keck,” Urry says. “First, with Keck’s NIRC2 instrument, to survey the remnants of galaxy mergers to find hidden dual nuclei—supermassive black holes that will eventually merge—and then, in this particular case, to confirm the presence of two galactic nuclei with Keck’s OSIRIS near-infrared field spectrograph.

“OSIRIS found broad infrared lines in the southern nucleus, confirming it is certainly an active galactic nucleus, and measured the velocity offset between the two nuclei.”

Data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)—an international observatory co-operated by the US National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory—enabled astronomers to find the exact location of the two black holes in the UGC4211 galaxy. Additional data came from the Chandra and Hubble telescopes, the ESO’s Very Large Telescope, and the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECalS) on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.

“Simulations suggested that most of the population of black hole binaries in nearby galaxies would be inactive because they are more common, not two growing black holes like we found,” says Michael Koss, a senior research scientist at Eureka Scientific and the lead author of the new research.

Koss added that the use of ALMA was a game-changer, and that finding two black holes so close together in the nearby universe could pave the way for additional studies of the phenomenon.

Urry and her colleagues says that if close-paired binary black hole pairs are indeed commonplace, there could be significant implications for future detections of gravitational waves, as well.

“It will help us develop estimates of black hole merger rates for future gravitational wave detectors,” Urry says.

Source: Yale University

Tigers in Nepal were two to three times more likely to cross highways during COVID-19 lockdowns than before it, a new study shows.

The researchers used the nationwide lockdown as a natural experiment to test the responses of two GPS-collared tigers to dramatic reductions in traffic volume along a national highway.

“Our results provide clear evidence that vehicle traffic on major roads impedes tiger movements, but also that tigers can respond quickly to reductions in human pressures,” says lead author Neil Carter, a conservation ecologist at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability.

“The fact that both tigers immediately changed their behaviors is encouraging because it means that mitigating road impacts can lead to quick conservation benefits by enabling tigers to more freely roam their territories.”

The study in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation is the first to use GPS collars to assess road impacts on tigers, Carter says. It’s also the first systematic research on Nepalese tigers using either radiotelemetry or GPS tracking since the 1980s.

Roads pose a major and growing challenge for the conservation of endangered species. Carnivores are particularly susceptible to the impacts of roads because they often require large habitats, have low reproductive output, and occur in low densities.

Fewer than 4,500 tigers remain in the wild. They are found mainly in South Asia and Southeast Asia, regions that will experience accelerating pressure from human development in coming years.

A 2020 study that Carter led found that nearly 15,000 miles of new Asian roads will be built in tiger habitat by mid-century, deepening the striped feline’s extinction risk and highlighting the need for bold new conservation measures now.

Nepal is experiencing rapid transportation-infrastructure growth in its southern lowlands (known as the Terai), a region that is home to all of the country’s roughly 250 tigers.

The ongoing widening of the 639-mile East-West (Mahendra) Highway from two lanes to four is especially concerning for biodiversity conservation because the road bisects all tiger-bearing parks in Nepal, as well as important habitat corridors and bottlenecks.

The widening project is being carried out with little mitigation of its impacts on tigers, which is likely to have severe consequences for the big cats, their prey, and other wildlife in national parks and adjacent forests, according to the researchers. The study includes several recommended mitigation measures.

For the study, Carter and his colleagues equipped two wild tigers, one adult male and one adult female, with GPS collars to record detailed information about their movements and behaviors around the East-West Highway prior to the lane-expansion project.

The male tiger was captured and collared in Parsa National Park on February 14, 2021. The female was captured and collared in Bardia National Park on March 26, 2021. The East-West Highway passes through both parks.

During the study, the government of Nepal implemented its second national COVID-19 lockdown, from April 30 to September 1, 2021. Road use was dramatically reduced nationwide as trade was postponed, many businesses were closed, and social activities were heavily restricted.

In Parsa National Park, average daily traffic along the East-West Highway declined 85% during the lockdown. No traffic data was available for the lockdown period in Bardia National Park, but the researchers assumed that reductions were comparable.

The study revealed clear differences in movement patterns between the two tigers.

In the month after the lockdown began, the male tiger’s home range more than tripled in size to 213 square miles. He crossed the highway significantly more times during the lockdown than in the pre-lockdown period, and significantly more times at night than during the day.

The female tiger, in contrast, was less affected by the highway, though she did cross more easily during the lockdown. In addition, the female’s home range was at its maximum in the month before lockdown (April 2021) and subsequently shrank during the first month of lockdown.

Carter and his colleagues say the differences in movement patterns between the two tigers likely reflect differences in highway traffic patterns and regulations, as well as ecological conditions, at the two sites.

The female tiger in Bardia National Park lives in an area where traffic speed is tightly controlled using a timed entry/exit system enforced with fines by armed guards. The lower traffic volume and strict regulation of speed in Bardia likely reduced overall disturbances from vehicles on the female—even before the lockdown.

The researchers suspect the female became habituated to the highway traffic in Bardia and therefore displayed a limited behavioral response during the lockdown.

The male tiger, in contrast, occupied an area in Parsa National Park where speed limits on the highway were not enforced and where traffic is constantly shipping goods back and forth between Nepal and India at all times of the day.

The highway acted as a major barrier to the male’s movements, as evidenced by his pre-lockdown avoidance of all areas near it. That changed during the lockdown. The male began visiting locations near roads at night and also crossed the highway more frequently, especially at night but even a couple of times during the day.

With greater use of areas near roads and increased likelihood of crossing the highway, the male tiger greatly expanded his home range to the west side of the highway immediately following the onset of lockdown.

“This expansion suggests that the high traffic pre-lockdown had constrained the male tiger’s movements to one side of the highway,” says coauthor Amy Zuckerwise, a doctoral student at the School for Environment and Sustainability. “Cessation of traffic released the tiger from those constraints to roam more broadly.”

The researchers acknowledge that they are unable to make inferences about population-level responses to road networks based on the GPS tracking of two wild tigers. However, it’s now clear that the highway and its road traffic affect the space use, habitat selection, and movements of individual tigers.

The research team intends to eventually track six to eight Nepalese tigers, Carter says. In the meantime, the authors urged policymakers in Nepal to mitigate the expected impacts of the highway widening project “before it is too late.”

In Parsa National Park, where unregulated road traffic impeded the male tiger’s movements, installing wildlife crossing structures such as underpasses and overpasses would enable tigers and their prey to move across the highway more freely.

Likewise, enforcing speed limits on the highway through Parsa National Park—using signs, speed bumps, speed traps, and strict fines for speed-limit violations—would decrease the human disturbances associated with traffic, the authors wrote.

All capture, handling, and immobilization of tigers was done in accordance with the University of Michigan IACUC Protocol #PRO00010077, recommendations in the ARRIVE Guidelines and the “Operational manual for the satellite telemetry on Royal Bengal tiger 2021” approved by the Nepal Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation.

The authors thank the Nepal Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation, Bardia National Park, and Parsa National Park for granting permission to conduct the research. They also thank the field technicians from the National Trust for Nature Conservation in Nepal for the immobilization and GPS-collaring of the tigers.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service Rhinoceros and Tiger Conservation Fund.

Source: University of Michigan

A new study comparing data from Heron Reef and the Middle East’s Gulf of Aqaba has disproved the long-held theory that coral reefs only have the capacity to emit CO₂.

The first-of-its-kind discovery is the result of an international study that found that dust blown in from nearby deserts can convert coral reefs into CO₂ sinks.

Professor Hamish McGowan from the University of Queensland’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences says the discovery was made after researchers observed a correlation between influxes of CO₂ and periods of increased dust concentrations in the atmosphere around the reefs.

“We were surprised at how significant a role dust accumulation played in switching coral reefs from a CO₂ source to a CO₂ sink,” McGowan says.

“This process was previously thought to be impossible, but our research proves otherwise.

“We found that the build-up of dust in the traditionally low-nutrient and low-chlorophyll waters of the Gulf of Aqaba actually fertilizes and improves coral-growing conditions and photosynthesis in reef ecosystems.”

McGowan says the results will allow for the development of more accurate carbon budgets for the world’s oceans.

“The process we have identified in this study actually contributes to more accurate accounting of carbon around the globe,” McGowan says.

“This informs predictions of the impact of atmospheric carbon on climate and climate sensitive ecosystems such as coral reefs.”

Professor Nadav Lensky from Geological Survey Israel says these improved conditions mean desert reefs have the potential to act as a place of refuge for coral.

“In this study we also measured extreme evaporation rates over the coral reefs in the Gulf of Aqaba, at the most northern tip of the Red Sea,” Lensky says.

“This process consumes large amounts of heat and keeps water temperatures typically below the threshold that causes coral bleaching.

“Combined with the positive impact of dust deposition, these processes make the Gulf of Aqaba a more supportive environment for growing coral.”

The research establishes the causal controls on reef water temperatures, as opposed to previous predictions which were more focused on the correlation of global warming and coral bleaching.

Lensky says these findings will allow researchers to correctly attribute the cause of, for example, extreme high water temperature events that result in coral bleaching.

“Our research, which included analysis of data collected at Heron Reef on the Great Barrier Reef, has confirmed the crucial role of local meteorology and the prevailing weather patterns in determining reef water temperatures,” Lensky says.

“To further test and understand how dust may influence air-sea CO₂ exchange, we need to do more research into how this may change in different seasons and locations, such as over coral reefs like Ningaloo reef in northwest Australia.”

The research appears in Frontiers in Marine Science, Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, and the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Support for the work came from the Zelman Cowen Academic Initiatives fund.

Source: University of Queensland