Satellites, Beekeepers Track Climate Change Response

High-tech satellites combined with low-tech methods on the ground will soon be used to help understand how bees are responding to climate change, and to predict how far aggressive Africanized bees — sometimes called “killer bees” — will spread in North America.

The project combines two passions for leader Wayne Esaias of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Esaias is an oceanographer who specializes in remote sensing via craft such as satellites — and a master amateur beekeeper.

What triggered Esaias’s interest in the new project was data he collected in his backyard. When the flowering plants that bees rely on for food are blooming, beehives pack on up to 25 pounds per day, through reproduction and storing honey. This weight gain is easily detected when hives sit on scales (they are then called scale hives), and provides a precise and reliable way to track the flowering of local plants.

“It only lasts about 4-6 weeks and then it’s over,” Esaias said.

Esaias recorded hive weights every night for 15 years. One day he decided to plot the numbers. What he saw was the peak hive weight gain — corresponding to plant flowering — stepping back more than half a day per year.

Combining his results with historical data he dug up from the area, he found flowering is happening almost a month earlier than in the 1970s.

“It’s an astounding advance,” Esaias said. “Even though I work at Goddard with remote sensing data, and the ice folks are across the hall, and we’re aware of climate change, I was just shocked that it had been taking place in my backyard for the past 20 years .”

“The good news is there’s a lot of variability from year to year caused by short-term climate variations like El Nino,” he said. “Our bees have co-evolved with this and they’re used to it, so they tend to be very resilient. The disturbing thing is that there’s an overall trend … That might put them outside the realm of their experience.”

Now Esaias wants to use satellite data to get a better handle on changes in the timing of flowering plants and how bees might be affected. Sensors on NASA’s EOS satellites collect images of Earth at different wavelengths, allowing them to estimate leaf cover and when different types of vegetation emerge.

That’s not the same as plant flowering, but Esaias is hoping to link satellite information about when plants go green to when they flower to get large-scale information about the timing of flowering. “The scale hives form that link,” Esaias said.

Esaias presented his plan at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union today.

“One of the questions is how well they’ll be able to pick up the flowering events that are important for bees” from the satellite data, said Jon Harrison of Arizona State University in Tempe, who is a part of the project.

Bee Prefers Sex With Orchid Over Females

It’s no wonder romantic couples give each other flowers, since researchers have determined one orchid is so attractive to male bees that the males actually prefer sex with the orchid over sex with female bees of their own species.

The finding demonstrates the incredible seductive powers of certain flowers, and how these flowers — in this case Ophrys orchids — can compete with female insects for male attention.

The orchid sexual tool kit includes three powerful “weapons” that overwhelm male Colletes cunicularius bees through sight, touch and smell. All three mimic characteristics of female bees that are ready to mate.

“The visual mimicry includes (copying) the color and shape of a female (bee),” co-author Florian Schiestl told Discovery News.

“Tactile memory includes (copying) the hairs on the body of a female,” added Schiestl, a University of Zurich botanist and biologist.

He and colleague Nicolas Vereecken focused, however, on the orchid’s perfume, which humans cannot smell, but is irresistible to male bees.

One whiff of the scent encourages the bees to hop on flowers and mate with them, just as they would with a female bee. Unbeknownst to the male, pollen from the flower attaches to the bee during the process, so that when he hops to another flower, pollination takes place.

For the study, published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists collected 391 virgin C. cunicularius female bees and multiple Ophrys flowers from 15 different populations across Western Europe. Most females within solitary bee species mate just once during their lifetime, so finding virgins wasn’t too difficult.

The scientists analyzed the chemical composition of sex pheromones emitted by the female bees and compared this to the chemical make-up of the orchid’s perfume. The mixtures were nearly the same, containing the same compounds, except the chemical ratios were different in the orchid, meaning that the flower’s perfume wound up being its own unique blend, which the male bees actually preferred over the scent of the female bees’ sex pheromones.

The researchers tested this fact by tweaking the female pheromones so that they matched the orchid’s perfume. The scent, as expected, drove male bees into a lovemaking frenzy.

Antarctic Mega-Iceberg Suffocates Seals

Weeks after the controversial listing of polar bears as threatened species, new research graphically demonstrates how changes to polar ice can devastate local animals.

The findings of a grim new study illustrate the direct, and often immediate, effects that climate change can have on the physiology, behavior and survival of wild species.

An Iceberg the Size of Rhode Island

In 1998, ecologist and evolutionary biologist Terrie Williams of the University of California at Santa Cruz and her team began a study on Weddell seals in Antarctica.

Three years later, an enormous iceberg detached near Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound. According to Williams and her colleagues, the event was caused by global warming, which has likely been melting and weakening ice at the poles.

The 4,200-square-mile iceberg — dubbed B-15 — drifted westward and lodged on nearby Ross Island. The lives of countless animals would soon forever change.

Seals Struggle for Breathing Room

“Our first clue that there was a problem was that the seals were not returning to their usual pupping areas, and that there were fewer seals even later in the season,” Williams told Discovery News.

She and her colleagues noticed that the ice around Ross Island did not experience its usual “break-out” that year. Normally the ice thaws, creating thinner areas where diving seals can carve breathing holes in the ice shelf. Instead, the presence of B-15 thickened the surrounding ice.

“We started out with three feet of ice and were up to a nine feet thickness” by 2002, the last year of the study, Williams said.

Filming both above and below the thickened ice, Williams and her colleagues observed seals lining up to breathe at the few holes they were able to make with their front canine teeth. Lacking the energy to swim further, fights ensued in the lines, with animals lashing out at each other for access to air.

Williams explained that after B-15 dislodged, there were 80 miles of ice between McMurdo and the open ocean.

“Weddell seals can only swim four miles under ice before they have to come up to breathe, so you can see the problem,” she said.

Physiological Systems Overtaxed

The researchers measured the oxygen consumption of seals that managed to surface, and by analyzing the underwater video, calculated the energy cost of each stroke the seals made during dives.

After comparing these calculations with prior data on seals diving under normal conditions, the researchers found that the new environment simultaneously increased the seals’ need for oxygen and reduced their access to air.

Since seals dive to hunt, most were unable to catch enough prey to sustain themselves and their pups.

Pandas Evacuated From Quake-Hit Reserve

Six rare giant pandas were transferred Friday from the world-famous breeding center at Wolong, joining eight other animals who will leave the site in southwest China due to severe damage caused by last week’s quake.

Xinhua news agency said the six of the endangered animals were trucked to another nature reserve in quake-hit Sichuan province because of damage to their shelters and a food shortage caused by the May 12 earthquake.

“There is enough water now, but food is still a major problem. The pandas are in urgent need of bamboos and apples,” Xiong Beirong, an official with the Sichuan provincial forestry bureau, was quoted as saying.

The pandas were headed for a reserve near the city of Ya’an, about 124 miles to the southwest.

The fate of the Wolong pandas, possibly Sichuan’s most famed residents, has been a cause of public concern following the quake.

Wolong is a major tourist draw to the region and source of some of the animals that China has loaned to overseas zoos in diplomatic goodwill gestures.

The epicenter of last week’s quake was in Wenchuan county, about 20 miles from Wolong.

The quake had a magnitude of 8.0 on the Richter scale, and caused catastrophic damage and at least 55,000 deaths.

Eight other pandas were to be flown out of Sichuan to Beijing Zoo on Saturday, a zoo spokeswoman said on Thursday.

However, that was a previously scheduled transfer as the pandas were due to be displayed in the capital during the August 8-24 Olympic Games.

Humpback Whales Make Huge Comeback

Once hunted to the brink of extinction, humpback whales have made a dramatic comeback in the North Pacific Ocean over the past four decades, a new study says.

The study released Thursday by SPLASH, an international organization of more than 400 whale watchers, estimates there were between 18,000 and 20,000 of the majestic mammals in the North Pacific in 2004-2006.

Their population had dwindled to less than 1,500 before hunting of humpbacks was banned worldwide in 1966.

“It’s not a complete success, but it’s definitely very encouraging in terms of the recovery of the species,” said Jeff Walters, co-manager of the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary.

The study, sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is the most comprehensive analysis ever of any large whale population, said David Mattila, science coordinator for the sanctuary.

At least half of the humpback whales migrate between Alaska and Hawaii, and that population is the healthiest, Mattila said.

But isolated populations that migrate from Japan and the Philippines to Russia are taking a longer to recover after whaling operations ceased, he said.

“Whales are long-lived and give birth one at a time …. so if the population gets pushed too low, it may take quite awhile to come back. Maybe that’s what’s happening in the west,” Mattila said.

The whales are protected under federal laws that include the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act.

Shark Fin Demand Pushes 11 Species Near Extinction

Overfishing driven in part by an insatiable appetite for shark-fin soup has threatened 11 species of the ocean-dwelling predators with extinction, according to a report released on Thursday.

The first study to assess the worldwide status of 21 species of pelagic sharks and rays — those living and hunting in open seas — found that more than half are rapidly being fished out of existence.

Particularly vulnerable species include the short-finned mako, the thresher and the silky, said the report, to be published in the journal Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems.

“Despite mounting evidence of decline and increasing threats to these species, there are no international catch limits for oceanic sharks,” said co-author Sonja Fordham, a researcher at the Oceans Conservancy and Shark Alliance in Brussels.

“Our research shows that action is urgently needed on a global level if these fisheries are to be sustainable.”

Many big shark species have fallen prey to booming Asian economies where shark-fin soup is prized as a must-have delicacy at weddings and other banquet occasions. The fins are often sliced off of living fish which are then discarded in the sea.

Accidental “by-catch” by industrial fishing operations have also decimated shark populations, the study said.

Sharks and big rays are especially vulnerable to overfishing because they take many years to reach sexual maturity and have relatively few offspring.

“We are losing species at a rate 10 to 100 times greater than historic rates,” said the study’s lead author, Nicholas Dulvy, a professor at Sime Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

The report, presented at a major UN conference on biodiversity in Bonn, calls for the establishment and enforcement of science-based catch limits for sharks and rays, and a ban on the practice of “shark finning.”

The 11-day Bonn conference seeks to prevent the destruction of countless plant and animal species.

It is the ninth of its kind of countries who signed up to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.

Related Links :

Jennifer Viegas’ blog: Born Animal

Shark Conservation Act of 2008

Shark Alliance

How Stuff Works: Sharks

Discovery Channel: Sharkrunners

Caribou Food Supply Threatened by Warming

Caribou in West Greenland migrate inland in spring, to the western edge of the country’s inland ice sheet, where they give birth to their calves. There, they feed on freshly emerged plants, which provide the best nutrition.

But two new studies by Eric Post of the Pennsylvania State University and colleagues show that global warming has thrown this system out of whack. Plants are emerging earlier, and all at once across the landscape, so the caribou are arriving to find the plants they rely on are past their prime.

“Because of warming, food is becoming available earlier in the year for caribou. That might sound like a good thing, because caribou come out of the long Arctic winter hungry,” Post told Discovery News by e-mail from Greenland, where he is awaiting the spring calving season.

“But we also found that caribou are not adjusting their birth season to help keep up with changes in plant growth. As a consequence, their food is in a sense being taken off the table again before caribou have had a chance to get what they need.”

Post documented that over a period of six seasons — 1993, and 2002-2006 — the average spring temperature rose by more than 8 degrees Fahrenheit and plants emerged about two weeks earlier, while calf mortality increased fourfold and calf production declined by a factor of seven. These results were published online earlier this month in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

In the second study, appearing online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Post’s team showed that warming is also causing plants across the landscape to mature all at the same time. Normally, caribou would start out in the valley where plants emerge first and move uphill, following new plants as the season progresses.

“As it gets warmer, there’s less and less difference between the plants in the valley and those on the hilltop. So now, when the caribou goes uphill, counting on finding a good meal, it’s out of luck,” Post said. “The plants are past their peak.”

Cancer-Sniffing Dog to Be Cloned

A Japanese center which says it has trained a dog to sniff out human cancer cells is cloning the animal in South Korea, a Seoul-based biotechnology company and the dog’s owner said Wednesday.

Cloned fetuses from the black labrador retriever named Marine were last month implanted into a surrogate mother dog, said Ra Jeong-Chan, president of RNL Bio.

“We are going to see the clones around the end of this month,” Ra said.

Marine, who is six and half years old, lost her ability to reproduce when she had her womb removed because of disease.

She is owned by Yuji Satoh, a head trainer at St. Sugar Cancer Sniffing Dog Training Center, located at Shirahama in Chiba prefecture.

Satoh said experts from Seoul National University, which created the world’s first cloned dog in 2005, had taken some skin samples from Marine and brought them back to South Korea for the project.

“We are making clones of Marine. She is touted as having a world top cancer-sniffing ability. By making her clones, we want to promote studies into cancer-sniffing dogs,” Satoh said.

“It’s the world’s first cloning of a cancer-sniffing dog.”

He and the Korean firm, which is coordinating the project, have agreed to produce two clones and train them at Satoh’s center.

Extinct Tasmanian Tiger Gene Resurrected

Scientists said Tuesday they had “resurrected” a gene from the extinct Tasmanian tiger by implanting it in a mouse, raising the future possibility of bringing animals such as dinosaurs back to life.

In what they describe as a world first, researchers from Australian and U.S. universities extracted a gene from a preserved specimen of the dog-like marsupial — formally known as a thylacine — and revived it in a mouse embryo.

“This is the first time that DNA from an extinct species has been used to induce a functional response in another living organism,” said research leader Andrew Pask of the University of Melbourne.

The announcement was hailed here as raising the possibility of recreating extinct animals.

Mike Archer, dean of science at the University of New South Wales, who led an attempt to clone the thylacine when he was director of the Australian Museum, called it “one very significant step in that direction.”

“I’m personally convinced this is going to happen,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “I’ve got another group working on another extinct Australian animal and we think this is highly probable.”

Pask said in a telephone interview that while recreating extinct animals might be possible one day, it could not be done with the technique his team used on the Tasmanian tiger.

“We can look at the function of one gene within that animal. Most animals have about 30,000 genes,” he said.

“We hope that with advances in techniques that maybe one day that might be possible, but certainly as science stands at the moment, we are not able to do that, unfortunately,” he said.

“We’ve now created a technique people can use to look at the function of DNA from any extinct species, so you could use it from mammoth or Neanderthal man or even dinosaurs if there’s some intact DNA there.”

Colossal Squid Thaw to Be Webcast Live

Marine scientists in New Zealand on Tuesday were thawing the corpse of the largest squid ever caught to try to unlock the secrets of one of the ocean’s most mysterious beasts.

No one has ever seen a living, grown colossal squid in its natural deep ocean habitat, and scientists hope their examination of the 1,089-pound, 26-foot long colossal squid, set to begin Wednesday, will help determine how the creatures live. The thawing and examination are being broadcast live on the Internet.

The squid, which was caught accidentally by fishermen last year, was removed from its freezer Monday and put into a tank filled with saline solution. Ice was added to the tank Tuesday to slow the thawing process so the outer flesh wouldn’t rot, said Carol Diebel, director of natural environment at New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa.

The Discovery Channel is producing a new documentary about the squid, in cooperation with the museum.

After it is thawed, scientists will examine the squid’s anatomical features, remove the stomach, beak and other mouth parts, take tissue samples for DNA analysis and determine its sex, Diebel said.

“If we get ourselves a male it will be the first reported (scientific) description of the male of the species,” Steve O’Shea, a squid expert at Auckland’s University of Technology, told National Radio. He is one of the scientists conducting the examination.

The squid is believed to be the largest specimen of the rare deep-water species Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, or colossal squid, ever caught, O’Shea has said.

Colossal squid, which have long been one of the most mysterious denizens of the deep ocean, can grow up to 46 feet long, descend to 6,500 feet into the ocean and are considered aggressive hunters.