Carbon Chemist

Tag: Ecology

  • Climate Change Is Destroying Monarch Butterflies’ Winter Habitat

    Climate Change Is Destroying Monarch Butterflies’ Winter Habitat

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    every year, at the beginning of November, one of the most impressive natural spectacles in the world takes place in Michoacán, Mexico. Hundreds of millions of migrating monarch butterflies settle in the forested massifs of the country’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, roughly 100 kilometers west of Mexico City. Having flown south for eight months, beginning their journey in the northern United States or southern Canada, they hibernate here for the winter before mating in the spring.

    After flying for more than 4,000 kilometers, the butterflies land in the oyamel fir trees of the Ejido el Rosario region, where for weeks they congregate, protecting themselves from the wind and the cold nights. Without these trees, the butterflies would not be able to survive their exhausting journey.

    The oyamel fir grows in a very small climatic space, one that is humid yet cold. “Its distribution is very limited to the highest mountains in central Mexico,” says Cuauhtémoc Sáenz Romero, a professor at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. Sáenz Romero is the lead author of a recent study that anticipates that this forest will gradually deteriorate to the point of disappearance as a result of climate change, endangering the butterflies.

    For the roosting monarchs, the oyamel canopy acts as a buffer to the local temperature and humidity, Sáenz Romero explains. “During the day, under the shade of the oyamel, the environment stays 5 degrees Celsius cooler than outside. It is a protection against high temperatures. At night it is the other way around, resulting in a 5 degree Celsius warmer environment.” The density of the canopy also protects against winter rain. “If the temperature drops below zero and the butterflies get their wings wet, they can freeze. That’s why these trees represent such a particular habitat,” says Sáenz Romero.

    After awaking from hibernation and mating in central Mexico, the insects fly north to Texas in the United States, where they lay their eggs. “For all this, they need energy reserves to return, which they don’t have to spend on fighting the cold in the wintering sites,” he explains.

    This fine balance for their survival is provided only by the oyamel firs. However, some models indicate that a climate conducive to them will have disappeared in this area by 2090. “Due to rising temperatures, we are observing a process of forest decline,” says Sáenz Romero, who is leading an initiative to establish new overwintering sites for the monarchs, which are on the red list of threatened species.

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  • Will humans ever speak wolf? A scientist unravels the complexities of animal chatter

    Will humans ever speak wolf? A scientist unravels the complexities of animal chatter

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    Download Nature hits the books 09 December 2024

    Zoologist Arik Kershenbaum has spent his career studying animals and how they communicate in the wild. In his book Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication, Arik takes a deep dive into the various forms of communication, from wolf howls to gibbon songs, to look at how different species get their points across, why they do it the way they do, and what insights they provide into our own use of language.

    Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication Arik Kershenbaum Penguin (2024)

    Music supplied by SPD/Triple Scoop Music/Getty Images

    Wolf howl via NPS & MSU Acoustic Atlas/Jennifer Jerrett

    Slowed down dolphin whistle via Arik Kershenbaum

    Hyrax song via Arik Kershenbaum

    Pileated gibbon song via Rushenb CC BY-SA 4.0

    Never miss an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for the Nature Podcast is available too.

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  • Where in the world is there potential for tropical-forest regeneration?

    Where in the world is there potential for tropical-forest regeneration?

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    • RESEARCH BRIEFINGS

    To restore tropical forests at scale requires cost-effective methods. An estimated 215 million hectares — an area larger than that of Mexico — have potential for natural forest regeneration, which could lead to an estimated above-ground sequestration of 23.4 gigatonnes of carbon over 30 years.

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  • Nectar-loving Ethiopian wolves may be the first carnivore pollinators

    Nectar-loving Ethiopian wolves may be the first carnivore pollinators

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    An Ethiopian wolf licks nectar from the Ethiopian red hot poker flower

    Adrien Lesaffre

    Ethiopian wolves feed on the sweet nectar of a local flower, and may be the first carnivores discovered to act as pollinators.

    The Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) is the rarest wild canid species in the world and Africa’s most threatened carnivore. Endemic to the Ethiopian Highlands, fewer than 500 individuals survive.

    Sandra Lai at the University of Oxford and her colleagues observed Ethiopian wolves lapping up the nectar of Ethiopian red hot poker (Kniphofia…

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  • When is a soil too dry for plants to take up water?

    When is a soil too dry for plants to take up water?

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    • RESEARCH BRIEFINGS

    As soil dries, plants limit water loss by closing tiny apertures called stomata in their leaves. A global analysis reveals that the soil water-content values at which this stomatal control starts depend on the hydraulic properties of the soil, and that plants’ ability to adapt to drought are specific to soil texture.

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  • What a forest’s glow can reveal about the impact of environmental change

    What a forest’s glow can reveal about the impact of environmental change

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    “In this photograph, I’m installing a chlorophyll fluorometer into a Scots pine tree (Pinus sylvestris) at a forest station in Hyytiälä, Finland, which is 200 kilometres north of the main campus at the University of Helsinki. I’m 20 metres above the ground, on a scaffold.

    The tool records the light emitted by leaves or needles in the far-red part of the spectrum. Almost every chlorophyll-containing organism creates this light. The intensity is very low — only about 1% of absorbed light is emitted as fluorescence – but its variations make the signal informative.

    Measuring the wavelength and intensity of this light, and comparing them with changes in carbon dioxide levels and the emissions of some volatile organic compounds from plant leaves, might make it possible to draw a relationship between them. Eventually, fluorescence data obtained remotely, from towers, drones, aircraft or satellites, might lead to a better understanding of how trees and plant ecosystems are responding to a rapidly changing environment.

    My colleagues and I have placed fluorometers and automated chambers in this hectare of forest to measure gas exchange. The area is filled with the sound of machinery — the hissing of the pumps that operate the gas-exchange chambers, the humming of small motors and the beeping of detection equipment. These aren’t the sounds of a normal forest, but they are the sounds of our science.

    My work is all about zooming in and out to understand plants at different scales, and how they interact with the environment on a local to global scale. Future work might move towards a detailed understanding of a single leaf or chloroplast. In many respects, the complexity inside a leaf is comparable to what we find in a forest ecosystem, but it is much more difficult to measure.”

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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  • Australian megafires drove complex biodiversity outcomes

    Australian megafires drove complex biodiversity outcomes

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    Nature, Published online: 13 November 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-03549-1

    An ambitious analysis of data has revealed the effects of the 2019–20 Australian megafires on biodiversity. It turns out that the outcome is more nuanced than just the anticipated picture of a massive loss of species.

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  • Invasive Species Are Threatening the Quality of New York’s Tap Water

    Invasive Species Are Threatening the Quality of New York’s Tap Water

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    “You can see an ecosystem change overnight—specifically with hydrilla. You’ll see a normal pond, and then at the end of the growing season, it’s completely full of hydrilla,” said Nicole White, founder of Little Bear Environmental Consulting, which often works with city and state departments to combat invasive species. “Nothing else can survive there. It’s choked out.”

    White, in partnership with other organizations including the Department of Environmental Protection, worked to eradicate hydrilla in the Croton River from 2018 to 2022. Out of the 449 sites they initially sampled, hydrilla was present at 40 percent of them.

    Ultimately, they successfully eradicated hydrilla from three miles of downstream river using a very low concentration of herbicide for five seasons, but the impact of the hydrilla on the river’s ecosystem was so severe that at the end of the project, White had to replant many native aquatic plants in the Croton River.

    According to Taylor, hydrilla still remains at the New Croton Reservoir. The Department of Environmental Protection is also using herbicide to change that.

    The presence of hydrilla in the reservoir can have implications for not just the marine ecosystem, but also the water quality and the survival of local birds. Hydrilla is also known to harbor cyanobacteria, which can turn into a toxin–Aetokthonos hydrillicola. This type of harmful algae can kill waterfowl and bald eagles, and has the potential to harm human health.

    “It’s a neurotoxin, so in places where Aetokthonos is found on hydrilla, lots of wildlife have died from brain lesions,” said White. “So fish have died, reptiles, like turtles, have died, waterfowl that eat the hydrilla, and then the predators of those waterfowl as well.”

    Climate change leads to warmer weather in the fall and more extreme precipitation events which move sediments around in the water column. This creates better conditions for the spread of hydrilla, of cyanobacteria blooms, and, by proxy, of these toxins. Their presence has not been confirmed in New York state, though the Department of Environmental Protection is sampling for it.

    The Water Flea, a Looming Threat

    The fishhook water flea was found in the reservoir last year. The novelty of its arrival means that the Department of Environmental Protection officials have not seen adverse impacts on the marine ecosystem yet, and its wider implications for the food chain are unknown. The water flea can impact water quality by eating large quantities of zooplankton, which creates better conditions for the growth of harmful algae blooms. Taylor believes it was likely transferred through fishing gear because the water flea’s eggs can survive drying out for long periods of time.

    Similarly to zebra mussels, it is virtually impossible to completely rid a water body of fishhook water fleas once they have established themselves. The most important thing to many scientists is often stopping their spread to new waterways—around 40 percent of New York’s freshwater is connected to canals, which makes it much easier for species to move around.

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  • A spider’s windproof web

    A spider’s windproof web

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    Nature, Published online: 05 November 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-03467-2

    A garden spider innovates to prevent web destruction by gusts of wind, and researchers call for a multidisciplinary approach to teaching science, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.

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  • I track bird movement to enhance conservation efforts

    I track bird movement to enhance conservation efforts

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    “The bird in my hand is a yellow-breasted chat (Icteria virens). This species breeds in North America — occurring in southern British Columbia and southwestern Ontario in Canada and in much of the United States — and then migrates to Mexico and Central America during the Northern Hemisphere’s autumn months. The chat is a declining species in North America, in part because it relies on habitat adjacent to bodies of water such as rivers and streams, much of which has been destroyed. In 2001, one population in the Okanagan valley in Canada had just 25 breeding pairs remaining. But conservation actions, including monitoring these birds and restoring their habitats, have helped their populations to recover. There are now more than 250 breeding pairs in the area.

    This photo was taken in February 2024 in Asunción Atoyaquillo, near Tlaxiaco, Mexico. We know that population declines in North America can be linked not only to what happens in Canada and the United States, but also to what happens during migration or at the wintering grounds. Two years ago, I started a project with Scott Wilson, my colleague at Environment and Climate Change Canada in Delta, British Columbia, and several collaborators in Mexico, to study these birds during the winter to better understand the threats that they face.

    Here, Sergio Gómez-Villaverde (left) and Adrián Cabrera-Valenzuela (right) are helping me to tag a chat with a radio transmitter so that we can track its movement. We tagged 30 chats this year. Sergio leads a bird-conservation organization in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Adrián is a field biologist at the Bird Observatory of Tlaxiaco.

    One thing I love about this photo is that it shows that I don’t work alone. Sergio is holding a radio transmitter in a pair of tweezers, while Adrián is recording data. Could I do this work by myself? Probably, but it’s a lot easier when you have partners.”

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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