scientific research

Researchers track large marine predators across the globe

I spent the spring and summer of 2002 studying at Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, Calif. -- splashing around in tide pools, diving in kelp forests, and wading through mud in Elkhorn Slough. One of the highlights of my time there was helping Dr. Barbara Block and Dr. Dan Costa experiment with placing satellite tags on elephant seals. These seals can dive as deep as 1700 ft, spending up to 30 minutes underwater, so they were great test subjects to see how the tags would hold up.

After capturing a few seals on Año Nuevo Island and trucking them an hour down the coast to Hopkins, the scientists glued the tags on and released them, tracking their progress as they swam back home.

Block and Costa are lead scientists in the Tagging of Pacific Predators project. The project is helping them to understand where migrating sharks, leatherback turtles, bluefin tuna, seals, albatross, and other large marine animals spend their time.

Not only do the tags track the animals' location, swim speed, and depth and duration of dives, but they also collect information about the temperature and salinity of the seawater, which is beamed back to the researchers via satellite. Fancy, eh?

Army brings blenders to figure out what’s killing off bees

Scientists have pondered whether cell phones are the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, which has wiped out about a quarter of the North American honeybee population and poses a threat to a quarter of our food supply. They’ve also wondered if the cause could be a virus. Or pesticides. Or mites. Or all of the […]

A professor of History and Science Studies explains

For those interested in why the scientific community is so certain about climate change, take a look at this presentation and this book chapter, both by Naomi Oreskes.

She does a great job explaining how science reaches conclusions, and why we can be pretty sure that humans are indeed warming the climate.

Washington watersheds deserve better data

Water-typing is the name for a process of identifying and cateorizing streams, lakes, and wetlands in terms of their importance for biodiversity and human use. It's a pretty basic inventory developed by the Washington Department of Natural Resources in the 1970s, and it works, but only when it's done right.

The accompanying image shows what happens when it's done wrong. In January, this important habitat for fish was logged without any protection simply because the map was in error: it failed to show that this stream supported fish. Normally, this sort of waterway would have at least received a 58 foot buffer. An important regional group, the Wild Fish Conservancy (the author of the photo), has demonstrated that the original maps underestimate the actual miles of fish-bearing streams statewide by up to 50 percent!

Nice job, Einstein

I'll give you some hints. Just a few days ago, a man walked on a stage a few hundred yards from where I sit to accept an honorary degree in science. Following is the speech that preceded the award:

As Einstein is to relativity you are to biodiversity -- the insight that our world is unimaginatively rich in its number of species, whose lives are inextricably woven together. This idea has powered much subsequent biological research and re-shaped forever human understanding of the world and our place within it. This intellectual journey began, as so often in science, with a child's curiosity -- in your case with the ants you collected in the series of Southern towns in which you were raised. Your fascination in the face of nature's detail led to your adult study of how species adapt to their surroundings and how genes and culture interact to affect social behavior. Most recently you have inspired the growing inquiry into the vast array of species with which we share this planet and into the delicate web that holds together all life. In doing so you have fathered the modern environmental movement and inspired countless scientists with the knowledge that there is so very much more of life to be discovered. Like Einstein you, too, are dedicated to unifying ideas across the disciplines -- to finding those areas in which science, humanities, and social sciences converge -- and to exploring how science can best inform religion, morality, and ethics. And, as relativity shaped so much of the human agenda of the Twentieth Century, so biodiversity stands poised to do in the Twenty-First -- providing head-spinning new insights along with the sober realization that upon the use we make of this knowledge hangs the very existence of human life.

Law & Order … in the ocean

Playing hard-nosed Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy, actor Sam Waterston has thrown the book at the bad guys for years on TV's Law & Order.

Bad guys on boats and beaches better watch out now, too, because Waterston recently joined Oceana's Ocean Council, a panel of academic, business, and philanthropic leaders who represent and support Oceana's efforts on the global stage. Also on the Ocean Council are actors Pierce Brosnan and Kelsey Grammar.

Recent report published projecting values of sea-level rise

As anyone who reads my posts knows, I am a big fan of the IPCC reports. They are the best summary of what the scientific community knows about climate change and how confidently we know it.

A recent article (subscription required, sorry) in Science suggests that some scientists view the IPCC as overly cautious:

In the latest report, its fourth since 1990, the IPCC spoke for scientists in a calm, predictably conservative tone (Science, 9 February, p. 754). It is, after all, an exhaustive, many-tiered assessment of the state of climate science based exclusively on the published literature. In IPCC's Working Group I report on the physical science of climate, 600 authors contributed to an 11-chapter report that drew 30,000 comments from reviewers. The report was in turn boiled down to a 21-page "Summary for Policymakers" (SPM). Its central projection of sea-level rise by the century's end -- 0.34 meter -- came within 10% of the 2001 number. And by getting a better handle on some uncertainties, it even brought down the upper limit of its projected range, from 0.89 to 0.59 meter.

The SPM did add that "larger values [of sea-level rise] cannot be excluded." Whatever has accelerated ice-sheet flow to the sea, the report said, might really take off with further warming -- or not. "Understanding of these effects is too limited" to put a number on what might happen at the high end of sea-level rise, it concluded. Lacking such a number, the media tended to go with the comforting 0.34-meter projection or ignore sea level altogether.

I have two conflicting views of this.

Or is that geoengineering at work?

A new study shows that geoengineering should work. Just not exactly how we imagined:

Geoengineering could indeed cool the atmosphere, ecologist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California, and colleagues conclude in their new analysis. The team examined the impact of 11 possible projects over the next century using computer simulations and assuming trends in greenhouse-gas emissions will continue unchecked.

The good news is such measures would be effective even if undertaken decades from now, the researchers report online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The bad news is that in all cases studied, reducing solar radiation would also shift global rainfall patterns, potentially drenching some areas and parching formerly productive agricultural land. Worse, the simulations predict that if the atmospheric fiddling suddenly stopped, the warming would accelerate dramatically -- possibly to 20 times the current rate -- because CO2 would still be accumulating.

They may not all be bad.

Two recent news stories from the Chesapeake illustrate well the opposite poles in the debate on invasive species. The first details the appearance of the cuddly-sounding mitten crab in Chesapeake waters, an Asian species that has also hitchhiked in ships to California, Germany and Great Britain. Articles about it use terms like alien and exotic for the little fellas, often pitting them against the beleaguered native blue crabs.

So the news that a foreign species of aquatic vegetation, once considered a major nuisance when it began rapidly colonizing the nearby Potomac River, has instead benefited the watershed's ecosystem interested me. Hydrilla first appeared in 1983 and created dense vegetation masses and even impeded boat traffic in some areas. It was feared that it would interfere with the native vegetation, itself an important food source for waterfowl and fish.

This 17-year study of hydrilla, though, found that not only did it not crowd out native species, but the natives actually increased. Hydrilla also became an important winter food source for waterfowl communities, which increased over this period. All of which makes me wonder about the hype and hyperbole used to describe each new "invasion."