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Minute 34- Wolbachia in mosquitoes

In humankind’s conquest of planet Earth, we rely on improbable allies – species we’ve recruited from nature to help us defeat our adversaries. But in this brave new world of “biocontrol,” is the enemy of an enemy always a friend?

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(soft, tense music) (Shane) They say if you want it done right, you should do it yourself.

And humans, we certainly aren't shy about that.

("Da Rockwilder" by Method Man and Redman) ♪ But we share this planet with millions of other species... -(dogs panting) -(snake hissing) ♪ ...some that stand in our way... -(mosquito buzzing) -(mouse squeaks) ♪ ...and others that stand in theirs.

♪ So, we enlist our enemies' enemies and send them into battle.

(Redman) ♪ Come on ♪ (Shane) Action.

Reaction.

Cause... (chess pieces tumble) ...and effect.

-(wing flapping) -(bees buzzing) But our most powerful weapons can have agendas of their own.

(whooshing) In the game of life, humanity's playing to win.

♪ But we aren't the only ones.

♪ Can we forge an alliance with nature to create the world we want?

(birds chirping) Or will we start something that we can't finish?

(intense music) (chess piece thuds) ♪ Welcome to the age of humans... (energetic music) ...where one species can change everything.

♪ And what we do reveals who we truly are.

This is Human Footprint.

♪ ♪ (indistinct chatter) (rooster crowing) ♪ People have been transforming the Earth for thousands of years.

♪ And we've made enemies along the way... ♪ ...species that destroy crops... (audible chewing) ...spread disease... -(mosquitoes buzzing) -(mosquito squelching) ...and disrupt ecosystems.

(dog ears flapping) But we've also got allies... (dog growling) ...species we've recruited to fight on our side.

(device beeps) ♪ And they've reshaped the world too.

♪ But is the enemy of an enemy always a friend?

♪ (soft, tense music) (creatures chirring) Thailand is one of the world's top rice producers.

♪ Farmers here often harvest three crops a year.

(rice grains clatter) ♪ And after each harvest, there's work to be done.

♪ ♪ (vehicle engine rumbling) ♪ (Shane) The rice farmers are at war with an invasive pest.

(whooshing) The golden apple snail.

(ducks quacking) And ducks love snails.

♪ How many ducks will get released here?

(grim music) ♪ (Shane) It's about to go down.

(intense music) (ducks quacking) Oh, it's the most adorable little army.

♪ Almost a quarter of Thailand's 30 million domestic ducks grow up like this, trucked around the countryside to devour pests.

(distorted quacking) ♪ ♪ After a few months, they can be sold for meat or returned to the breeder to produce eggs.

♪ The ducks are one form of biological control, or "biocontrol" for short.

It's the way we harness one species to control another.

(soft, tense music) ♪ Biologists like me have been using the word for about a hundred years.

♪ But biocontrol is much more ancient.

In fact, it didn't even start with humans.

(mystical music) ♪ In the Serengeti, whistling acacias grow hollow thorns to attract ants, which build nests inside the thorns and defend the tree against herbivores.

(elephant whines) ♪ This is nature's biocontrol.

The trees recruit the ants to help solve a problem.

Humans have been practicing biocontrol since at least the 4th Century, when farmers in southern China controlled pests by placing weaver ant nests into their citrus trees.

♪ Villagers would even collect wild ant nests and sell them to farmers, making this the first known commercial biocontrol.

(music distorts) Today, biocontrol is everywhere.

(soft music) But you might never notice, unless you know what you're looking for.

♪ (Aaron) So, they're super small.

They're hard to see.

The trick is not to breathe and blow 'em off the plate.

(Shane) Or inhale them, I imagine.

(record scratch) (chuckles) This is Aaron Avila.

He's got six dogs... (Lil' Bow Wow) ♪ Bow wow wow, yippie yo, yippie yay ♪♪ (Shane) ...and almost as many refrigerators to showcase his prized magnet collection.

("Bow Wow (That's My Name)" by Lil' Bow Wow) Aaron works with farmers in Washington to help solve their pest problems.

(insects chirring) -You seeing some?

-Yeah, they are much smaller than I anticipated.

(Aaron) Yep.

(fast-forward sound effect) (Shane) These tiny soldiers are western predatory mites, and they've got a job to do in this hop yard.

(mellow music) ♪ (Aaron) Over 70% of the nation's hops are produced right here.

This is a national treasure -is what you're saying... -This is, yep, yep.

(Shane) The backbone of America.

The backbone of beer drinkin' America.

Yes, that's right.

(Shane) Which is pretty much all of America.

(Aaron) That's right.

(foreboding music) (Shane) One of the toughest pests in a hop yard is another mite, the two-spotted spider mite.

And the usual method of controlling them isn't biological, it's chemical.

(energetic music) (Aaron) Historically and still widely used today -are miticide pesticide sprays.

-(spray hissing) (Shane) But miticides aren't working as well as they used to, because some spider mites are evolving resistance.

♪ Enter the western predatory mite, a spider mite's worst nightmare.

The trick is delivering them where they're needed.

(Aaron) We wanted to explore the possibility of being able to-- to do that via drone.

Okay.

And that is solely for application purposes and not because it's really fun to fly a drone?

(laughs) (soft music) The drone pilots load the mites into a custom dispenser, set the drone to fly a pre-programmed route, and, well, bombs away.

(energetic music) ♪ If everything goes as planned, the predatory mites will get the spider mites under control... (whooshing) ...and we can all raise a glass to our little eight-legged sidekicks.

(record scratching) -Cheers, friend.

-Cheers.

(mellow music) Oh, yeah, there's the hops.

(Aaron) Mm-hm.

♪ Pests and disease are something that we do battle with every day, every single day.

-Okay.

-If we're looking at food production as a whole, the number is 20-40% losses globally due to pests and diseases.

(soft, tense music) (Shane) When farmers come to Aaron's company for help, technicians diagnose their crop problems and propose solutions.

♪ The prescription could be a pesticide or some form of biocontrol.

(Aaron) Our number one concern is to help our growers remain successful.

And whatever that answer might be, that's what we're seeking out.

(Shane) And do you think, moving forward, that biocontrol will continue to play a larger role-- -Yes.

-...in--in that?

Mm-hm.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's definitely growing and it'll continue to grow.

-Okay.

-No doubt about it.

♪ (Shane) Humanity has some big problems to solve, and biocontrol can help us do it... ♪ ...as long as we're sure that we understand nature well enough to use it as a tool.

(ducks quacking) ♪ On the other side of the planet... ♪ ...that idea is under assault from a fast-moving army of toxic amphibians.

(energetic music) (Rick) There's very few things that all Australians will agree on.

(wings flapping) (frog thuds) But one of the things that will get general agreement is that cane toads are horrible and ugly... (projector slide changes) ...but, you know, you've really got to admire what the hell they've achieved.

♪ (Shane) This is Rick Shine, a legendary biologist and one of my science heroes.

♪ When he's not waxing poetic about one of Australia's most un-loved animals, you might find him out fishing.

(fishing line whirs) And keeping one eye on the water... (intense music) ...for these guys.

(mellow music) (tour guide) In the true Australian scientific description, he's referred to as a bloody big crocodile.

And if I tried to ride him like a horse, my tackle would tickle his back even on a cold day.

♪ (Shane) Here in the Northern Territory, giant crocs are a source of pride.

♪ Cane toads?

Not so much.

(Rick) You know, the conversation around the barbecue at night is, you know, "Bloody cane toads," and, "They're so ugly."

And it took me, you know, years before I actually looked at a cane toad and I thought, "Actually, that's a pretty damned attractive animal."

-Yeah.

-Uh, the eyes of a big female toad, you know, you can lose yourself in them.

They're gorgeous.

(mellow music) (Shane) Beautiful or not, cane toads are an invasive species in Australia.

♪ They're native to wet tropical forests in the Americas.

And their Australian invasion began... ♪ ...with biocontrol.

(Rick) There was a World Congress of sugar cane growers in Puerto Rico in 1932.

Everyone got told about how fantastic these giant toads were at controlling insects in your sugar cane.

Mm.

At the time, Australia's farmers were wrestling with a native pest called the greyback cane beetle.

(Rick) And it was only a year or two before an Australian had the brilliant idea that, "Hey, these giant toads can solve our problems as well."

(Shane) So, a young Aussie named Reg Mungomery went to Hawaii to get some toads.

Caught 101 toads, brought them back, released the babies, and the toads began their conquest of Australia.

(foreboding music) (Shane) The toads didn't stop the cane beetle, but they did make a lot more cane toads.

(water lapping) Because a single female can lay 20,000 eggs at a time.

They spread across Australia, eating whatever they could fit in their mouths... (tongue lapping) ...and poisoning native predators that tried to eat them.

(Rick) And it became clear that we had no way to stop them.

(energetic music) (Shane) Rick began studying cane toads in the early 2000s.

♪ Until then, he'd spent most of his career working on snakes.

(Rick) And I'd been doing that very happily, uh, for about 20 years when the cane toad invasion appeared over the horizon.

And it would have been crazy not to move sideways a little bit and become a bit of a toad biologist.

(soft music) (Shane) Rick's work reveals how cane toads are reshaping Australian ecosystems.

♪ (Rick grunts) (Shane chuckles) (Rick) You can tell by the thousands of bugs around your face that there's plenty here to eat.

-Oh yeah.

-Yep.

And this is the dry season.

In the wet season, the bugs are about a hundred times worse.

(Shane) Mm.

(Rick) Do you wanna try your toad-capturing technique, Shane?

(Shane) Yeah, let's see what we got here.

(intense music) ♪ (Rick) Nice grab.

(Shane) Took all the speed and strength I could muster to get her.

(Rick laughs) (quirky music) (soft music) Cane toads arrived at Rick's study site in 2005.

But these were not the same toads that Reg Mungomery released 70 years earlier.

In the early years, the cane toads spread at 10 to 15 kilometers a year.

(Rick) But then as they hit the drier country, they begin to go faster and faster and faster.

By the time they get to here, they're moving at 50 to 60 kilometers a year.

(Shane) The toads that arrived in 2005 were built for speed.

(whooshing) (Rick) It is a genuine case of evolution within a human lifetime.

Are we talking about longer limbs?

Are we talking about metabolism?

Is it behavioral?

Very easy question to answer: everything.

Every characteristic we measure about cane toads, except maybe the number of legs, seems to differ.

That would be truly terrifying.

(energetic music) And the toads didn't just evolve fast; they revealed a whole new kind of evolution.

The toad showed us that evolution can occur through space as well as through time.

(Shane) It's a process Rick calls "spatial sorting."

As toads spread across Australia, the fastest individuals led the way.

And they bred with other fast-moving toads, because they were the only ones there at the edge of the invasion.

(Rick) We call that the Olympic village effect on the suspicion there's a bit of interbreeding in Olympic villages among athletes.

Some of the babies of those toads will inherit genes for stamina from mum and long legs from dad.

And so the next generation goes even further.

And that's a cumulative process.

(Shane) It's different from natural selection, because the fast-moving toads don't necessarily pass on more of their genes.

(Rick) It's simply that you end up with that kind of genes over there and those kind of genes over here.

Yeah, so, you basically-- you get the athletes on one end and the couch potatoes at the other end.

Absolutely.

(Shane) But as the toads swept across the continent, they weren't the only ones evolving.

Rick and his team discovered an extraordinary adaptation in some of Australia's snakes.

(Rick) The most remarkable change is that they've evolved smaller heads.

And so if you've got a small head, you can't eat a really big cane toad.

(Shane) That's a good thing, because if you can't eat a big cane toad, you can't get poisoned by one.

(whooshing) (mellow music) But other species haven't proven so adaptable... (whooshing) ...and cane toads have had a profound impact on Australian ecosystems.

♪ (Rick) You know, it's not the toad's fault.

But yet people are very inclined to say, "Here's the foreigner, here's the invader."

And if we go out the backyard and hit 'em all on the back of the head with a golf club tonight, we'll feel like we're doing something to save Australian biodiversity.

(intense classical music) ♪ (ball whacks) ♪ (Shane) Hitting cane toads with golf clubs feels oddly specific.

♪ (Simon) In terms of where toads love to live, the golf course is just a heaven for them.

(majestic music) ♪ (Shane) Meet Simon Middap.

("Jump Around" by House of Pain) He lives on a golf course but doesn't play golf.

His game... is cane toad busting.

♪ Well, what are your personal feelings about cane toads?

-I dislike them intensely.

-Okay.

(Simon) So, I don't really like, you know, killing nature, but I have no problem with picking up a cane toad and disposing of it...humanely.

(Shane) Okay.

Humanely.

In other words, without the use of a nine-iron.

(Simon) So, we've come up with this thing, TTTT.

That stands for: Terrorize Toads on the Third Thursday.

Okay.

(Simon) We do it on the third Thursday because that made the name work.

(Shane) Okay.

The volunteer toad busters start their work when the golfers go home.

-(Western-style music) -(hawk cries) (Simon) And we'll see you back here at half past eight -with a bucket full.

-Okay.

-So, let's go and get 'em, eh?

-Good luck, everybody.

(Simon) Have fun.

(energetic music) (Shane) For a few hours each month, this is a dangerous place to be a toad.

♪ (Simon) There's another little one right beside him.

Look at that, two for one.

♪ Don't let it get away.

♪ (Shane) The most exciting part of the hunt?

The tally at the end of the night.

(Simon) 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31... You know, you get really excited when you get a thousand toads a night.

But you're never gonna do anything with the population just by catching the mature toads.

The process of catching toads is really so they can go back to the lab, they can get the toxin gland removed, and we can make these tablets.

They're called Bufo Tabs, which are things we put in the trap to catch tadpoles.

(Shane) But why are cane toad tadpoles drawn to bait made from cane toad poison?

Simple.

Because the tadpoles... (dramatic music) ...are cannibals.

(Rick) In Australia, a cane toad's worst problem is another cane toad.

(Shane) Female toads infuse their jelly-coated eggs with toxins.

(Rick) And as the jelly coat breaks down, the poisons begin to diffuse out into the water.

And that's a signal for any cane toad tadpole in that pond to come roaring across and try to eat them 'cause you get rid of the competition.

♪ (Shane) So, toad poison is the perfect bait for a tadpole trap.

(Rick) And as we speak, millions of cane toad tadpoles are being pulled out of natural water bodies across Australia.

(Simon) The purpose of really chasing the tadpoles is that's where you actually really do some numbers.

Last season, we caught over 250,000 tadpoles.

Whoa.

-A quarter million tadpoles!

-Yep.

(Shane) Removing tadpoles is a good way to control toads.

(hip-hop music) But Rick and his team realized they could also put the cannibals to work.

♪ (Rick) How about if we stop tadpoles from transforming into baby toads, if we kept them as perpetual tadpoles.

(Shane) And here's where things start to sound like sci-fi.

♪ (Rick) You can actually manipulate the genes inside the egg of a toad and knock out the gene that it needs to transform from the tadpole stage into the toad stage.

Oh.

♪ Rick and his team did just that, creating tadpoles that never grow up.

Rick calls them "Peter Pans."

(Rick) They eat a lot more toad eggs than a normal taddy does -because they're bigger.

-Mm-hm.

So, a pond full of Peter Pans is a deathtrap for new eggs.

(Rick) Toads can never breed there again until those tadpoles die of old age.

(mellow music) (Shane) It's a clever twist on biocontrol, turning a species against itself.

♪ Peter Pan tadpoles haven't been released in the wild yet.

But when they are, biocontrol might help solve a problem that biocontrol created.

The story of cane toads, you know, I think a lot of times it's presented as a cautionary tale.

Is that still, like, a fair example, or is it out of date now?

Yeah, look, I think it was probably out of date even in the 1930s.

But there was too much political weight behind the push to bring in the toad.

(Shane) It turns out, even Reg Mungomery had his doubts.

(Rick) So, this is Reg Mungomery writing in the Cane Growers' Quarterly Bulletin in 1934, "Such a project is not to be embarked upon lightheartedly, since a false step may have disastrous economic consequences through the upsetting of the whole biological balance."

And then a year later, they gave him a first class seat to Hawaii in a very nice ship.

And off he went and got the cane toads.

And did exactly the thing that he warned against.

-Yeah, I'm afraid so.

-Okay.

Why?

I guess, is the question.

Oh, why do young men do anything, Shane?

Come on.

(laughing) (soft music) (Shane) Was it the desperation of an industry that brought cane toads here?

Or the impetuousness of youth?

Maybe a bit of both.

Either way, Rick doesn't want to follow in Reg Mungomery's infamous footsteps.

(Rick) It's taken decades to get to the point that I'm comfortable we know enough about the system that we can carefully move forward.

I think maintaining that humility is a key to doing decent science and making responsible decisions.

(Shane) Australians could have turned their backs on biocontrol.

But they didn't.

Because fate dealt them another chance to get it right, this time with even higher stakes.

♪ (Martha) The rabbit has arguably been the most destructive nonhuman animal to ever arrive on the Australian continent.

Woah.

(hip-hop music) This is Martha Sear.

And this is her amazing collection of vintage animal-print shirts.

Martha's a historian at the National Museum of Australia... ♪ ...and she knows a lot about rabbits.

(Martha) They have sent animals and plants to the brink of extinction and beyond.

(Shane) Like cane toads, rabbits aren't native here.

♪ (Martha) In 1859, Thomas Austin decided that he would like to do a bit of hunting on his country property.

Mm.

(Martha) On Christmas Day in 1859, Thomas let 13 rabbits out.

-You know the exact day.

-Yep.

We know the day, we know the number.

From there, they ran wild.

(Shane) Australia was like an all-you-can-eat bunny buffet... (male voice) ♪ Perfect ♪ (Shane) And they reproduced... well, like rabbits.

(energetic music) (Martha) Within 50 years they had covered two thirds -of the Australian continent.

-Wow.

(Martha) It's the biggest mammal invasion that's ever happened on planet Earth as far as we know.

People talked about the land being covered by a moving gray blanket.

(Shane) Whoa.

The environmental and economic costs of this bunny bonanza were staggering.

Rabbits eat plants from top to bottom, roots included.

So, before long, there was nothing holding the soil down.

(Martha) Cities and towns were blanketed with huge dust storms, liberated by the little incisors of the bunnies.

(Shane) Of course, people also figured out a way to make a profit off them.

(cash register chimes) (soft, tense music) (Martha) They went in the freezer, and they got shipped off to feed people in Europe.

♪ (Shane) And rabbit meat was just the beginning.

(Martha) If you had walked through the streets of London in the 1920s, most of the gentlemen who lifted their hats to the ladies were wearing Australian rabbit fur on their head.

(Shane) But all that trapping barely made a difference, and rabbits reached plague proportions.

(Martha) So, Australia turned to its scientists to find methods of biological control, and that's where you get the story of myxomatosis.

(grim music) (Shane) Myxomatosis is a rabbit disease caused by the South American Myxoma virus, a relative of smallpox.

Researchers wondered if Myxoma could solve Australia's rabbit problem.

They were cautious, first making sure Myxoma couldn't infect any native species, and then testing the virus in small, isolated rabbit populations.

Myxoma was finally unleashed in early 1950.

And by the end of the year, people began to report hundreds, then thousands, and ultimately millions of dying rabbits.

(Martha) The piles of dead rabbits were stinking out pastoral properties.

And the spread traveled hundreds of kilometers in just a few short months.

-Months!

Woah, okay.

-Months.

It was a big success.

(soft, tense music) (Shane) More than 99% of Myxoma-infected rabbits died.

Agriculture and ecosystems rebounded as the rabbit population crashed.

(whooshing) (vehicle engine rumbling) But 70 years later, rabbits are still an inescapable part of Australian life.

(Ian) We have got quite a healthy population of rabbits, in our urban reserves within Canberra.

(engine rumbling) (Shane) Ian Lenon is a wildlife manager.

He's using heat-sensitive cameras to help locate and dispatch rabbits.

(Ian) Everyone behind the shooter.

(soft, tense music) (insects chirring) (gun clicks) (gunshot) (Shane) Ooh!

Yep, he got 'em.

(Ian) That's a female rabbit by the look of it.

(Shane) Okay.

It's hard to watch.

But the rabbits killed in these control programs provide important data.

What are you testing for here?

(Tanja) So, we take blood, for example, we can analyze that later for antibodies against the various viruses that are circulating.

-Okay.

-So we can see what was active in the area.

(mellow music) (Shane) And it turns out, Myxoma is still here.

So, why hasn't the virus finished the job?

(Tanja) Biological control is not an eradication tool.

It's a management tool.

(Shane) Meet Tanja Strive.

When she's not spending time with her very pampered chickens, she's working at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, on the next generation of rabbit biocontrol.

("Fight The Power" by Public Enemy) Because Myxoma isn't as effective as it used to be.

-(mosquitos buzzing) -(mosquito sucking) (Tanja) There is a window of time where the biting insects can pick up the disease and transmit it to the next animal.

So, as soon as the rabbit's dead, it's of no interest to a mosquito anymore.

(Shane) Okay.

The first strain of Myxoma was actually too lethal for its own good.

It killed so quickly that it limited its own transmission.

But new strains evolved that killed their hosts more slowly.

Since the less deadly strains spread more easily, they gradually replaced the older strains, just like the more infectious Delta and Omicron variants of COVID-19 replaced earlier strains of that virus.

♪ (Tanja) Today, Myxoma virus probably still kills a very large amount of rabbits.

But on its own, it would not be sufficient.

So, we need to continuously look for alternative tools and strategies.

(soft, tense music) (Shane) One of these alternatives emerged in the 1990s.

(Tanja) So the Calicivirus causes an infectious hepatitis.

It's one of the most virulent viruses that we know to affect mammals.

It was on track to be released, but it actually got away from an offshore island in Australia where they were doing field trials.

(Shane) Luckily, the escaped Calicivirus had already gone through rigorous testing to avoid unexpected impacts.

(Tanja) And again, it was spectacularly successful.

It knocked down populations by over 90% in some areas.

(Shane) Calicivirus is spread by flies feeding on dead rabbits.

Unlike Myxoma, it doesn't need to keep its host alive, so it probably won't become less virulent over time.

But rabbits could still evolve resistance.

(Tanja) And rabbits being rabbits, you only need to miss a few and they'll build up again.

(tractor rattling) (Shane) So, Australia's using every tool they've got.

♪ (smoking device rumbling) ♪ (Tanja) Controlling invasive animals is not a solution that gives everyone the warm and fuzzy feelings.

But if you don't do it, the problem isn't going to go away.

(soft music) (Shane) Which leaves Australians in a tough spot.

♪ (Martha) You don't forget the sound of that crack, when the rabbit's neck's broken.

And even as a seven-year-old, I knew that the rabbits were decimating the populations of native animals and plants that I loved.

But I could also see that those rabbits were themselves living things.

It's a very conflicted story for Australians.

♪ (Shane) Biocontrol has completely reshaped this island nation.

And it's probably here to stay.

(mellow music) (audible chewing) ♪ (Raghu) On average across all of the weed biocontrol projects we've done in Australia, the return on investment is over 20 to 1.

(Shane) Okay.

Raghu Sathyamurthy is a biologist who studies invasive weeds and leads the CSIRO Biosecurity Research Program in Brisbane.

(Raghu) There's over 10,000 plant species that have been introduced into the country, which is why when you would have come through an Australian airport, the emphasis on biosecurity is very strong.

(Shane) "Biosecurity" means keeping unwanted organisms out.

-They don't play around.

-No, no, they do not.

-They do not play around.

-They do not play around.

(Shane) Biocontrol often entails bringing in non-native species, but Raghu thinks even on this island continent, biocontrol done right has a role to play.

(Raghu) We have a social license for doing this kind of work in Australia because of a hundred years of having done this and people having seen the benefits of it.

(Shane) Before the cane toad, there was the prickly pear, an invasive cactus that blanketed 60 million acres of Australia in the 1920s.

Researchers identified a South American caterpillar that only ate prickly pears.

Legions of workers deployed 3 billion caterpillar eggs.

And the prickly pear was vanquished.

(Raghu) The cane toad example came right hot on the heels -of the prickly pear example.

-Okay.

(Raghu) So, there was this sort of sense that biological control was easy, it's not!

They got a little too cocky is what you're saying.

(Raghu) Well, they got a little bit more confident than they should have been, yeah.

-Okay.

-♪ Just a little bit of history repeating ♪♪ ("History Repeating" by Propellerheads/Shirley Bassey) (Shane) Today, Raghu's team studies new biocontrol agents in one of the most biosecure facilities in the country.

But like the Calicivirus escaping containment before its release, the risk will never be zero.

♪ And as a great movie scientist once said... (soft music) ..."Life finds a way."

♪ (Raghu) There is always inherent risk.

The question is, how does that risk compare to the benefits?

-Mm-hm.

-Doing nothing is also a decision that has its own risks and benefits.

Doing nothing means you're willing to live with the problem and its consequences.

(Shane) The cost of doing nothing is often what spurs us into action.

Especially when it's not just our crops or ecosystems at stake, but our very lives.

♪ (whooshing) (mellow music) ♪ (motorbike engine humming) ♪ (laughing) ♪ (Shane) This is Nelson Grisales.

♪ He never misses a chance to take his wife salsa dancing in the nightclubs of Medellin.

♪ By day, Nelson's a medical entomologist focused on preventing mosquito-borne diseases.

♪ Dengue fever is transmitted by a mosquito called Aedes aegypti, which can also carry Yellow Fever, Zika, and Chikungunya.

♪ Exactly what is a vector?

And the way mosquitoes share pathogens with us... ♪ ...you're not gonna like it.

♪ (laughs) It was gross before, and I didn't appreciate it.

And now it--now it's grosser.

♪ But what if we could stop Dengue transmission from mosquitoes to humans?

(lively music) That's what Nelson and his colleagues at the World Mosquito Program are trying to do.

♪ ♪ (soft music) Wolbachia are bacteria that naturally inhabit insects, living inside their cells.

(mosquito sucking) Aedes aegypti doesn't have its own strain of Wolbachia in nature, but researchers infected them in the lab with Wolbachia from fruit flies.

And they discovered something pretty amazing.

A mosquito carrying Wolbachia can bite a Dengue-infected human without transmitting the virus to its next victim.

The scientists realized they could be looking at a way to stop Dengue in its tracks.

(hip-hop music) ♪ But only if the bacteria would spread in a wild mosquito population.

♪ Wolbachia isn't contagious like a cold.

Instead, mothers pass it to their offspring through the egg.

So, how can Wolbachia spread?

By manipulating mosquito reproduction.

Infected females produce infected young, whether their mate was infected or not.

Un-infected females mating with infected males don't produce any young at all.

So, with every generation, a greater proportion of the mosquitoes carry Wolbachia, until the whole population is infected.

The program's goal is to trigger this bacterial chain reaction by releasing Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes.

♪ -Per week?

-Per week.

(Shane) The workers in this "biofactory" mass-produce Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes from eggs, to aquatic larvae, to flying adults.

Ugh, that's so many mosquitoes!

Aw, I'm just getting itchy looking at that many mosquitoes.

Male mosquitoes are happy to eat sugar water.

But the females, they're out for blood.

Theoretically, if I were in there, how long would it take before I'd look like a mummy?

(laughs) (blood trickling) No one's gonna volunteer for that job.

So, Nelson and the team feed the females with blood donated by local blood banks.

(hip-hop music) They are furious.

They are really going at it.

♪ After a hearty meal, the females lay eggs and the cycle repeats.

♪ This one facility can produce 30 to 40 million eggs per week.

Today, the World Mosquito Program is working in more than a dozen countries.

♪ And that means convincing local communities that a solution to their mosquito problem is releasing more mosquitoes.

(motorbike engine humming) (energetic music) ♪ ♪ On the ground, that outreach is led by local community workers, like Maryory Betancur.

(bright music) Gaining the community's trust meant full transparency about the project's goals and its methods.

♪ Today, the communities involved are seeing results.

♪ Colombian cities where Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes were released have far fewer lab-confirmed Dengue cases.

And in 2021, a larger, randomized study in Indonesia found that releasing the mosquitoes reduced the chance of a person contracting Dengue by 77%.

So, the World Mosquito Program looks like a biocontrol success story.

But some experts have doubts.

(phone ringing) (Jason) I think if there's one thing that defines humans, it's our ability to twist the environment to suit ourselves.

("Gimme the Loot (Instrumental)" by The Notorious BIG) (Shane) This is Jason Rasgon.

In his home workshop, he's got a knack for repairing vintage pocket watches.

(Notorious BIG) ♪ Rolex watches and colorful swatches ♪ ♪ I'm diggin' in pockets, ... can't stop it ♪♪ (Shane) In the lab, Jason studies mosquitoes and the diseases they carry.

♪ When the World Mosquito Program first showed that Wolbachia could block Dengue transmission, he was intrigued.

(Jason) And since we'd been working on Wolbachia for a long time, we'd been working on West Nile for a long time, it seemed sort of a natural thing to kind of put those two questions together.

We were basically honestly trying to jump on the bandwagon.

(soft, tense music) (Shane) Jason was working with Culex tarsalis, a mosquito known for carrying West Nile Virus.

(Jason) We developed techniques to artificially infect that particular mosquito with Wolbachia.

When we did that we found something a little unexpected.

The mosquitoes that were infected with Wolbachia actually had a greater probability of becoming infected with West Nile.

So, it actually increased their susceptibility to virus.

(mosquitoes buzzing) (Shane) Jason and other researchers dug deeper and found that Wolbachia could affect mosquito-borne viruses in a variety of ways.

(Jason) You can have highly variable results depending on what mosquito or what arthropod you're talking about, what Wolbachia strain you're talking about, what pathogen you're talking about.

(whooshing) Variation in environmental factors... -(rain pattering) -(water lapping) ...such as temperature or relative humidity.

(rain pattering) (Shane) And all these factors can interact in ways you wouldn't expect.

(Jason) You can have a particular Wolbachia strain in a particular mosquito that actually blocks one pathogen but might have no effect on a different pathogen or even the opposite effect on a different pathogen.

And so those are the kind of things that concern me a little bit when these things are being released into natural populations.

(Shane) And as someone who likes to understand how things work, Jason has another concern.

(watch gears clicking) (Jason) We still don't really have a good handle on what the actual mechanism of how Wolbachia blocks pathogens in mosquitoes.

(motorbike engine rumbling) (Shane) He's worried that we might not know enough to intervene or even recognize if something's gone wrong.

Not everyone shares Jason's reservations, but they illustrate why communities should approach these solutions with eyes wide open.

That's something, Jason says, that the World Mosquito Program does really well.

(Jason) The public engagement and the public participation was never done as an afterthought.

It was baked into the very foundation of the project from the very, very beginning.

I think that's a model for how these things need to be done.

(soft music) So, while I might not agree with every sort of technical decision that they make, I really want these things to work.

(mosquitoes buzzing) These are devastating diseases.

They affect, you know, billions of people.

♪ (Shane) The question is, when are these approaches ready for widespread use?

And the answer is... (mosquito buzzing) ...that it kind of depends on who you ask.

♪ I think whenever we're faced with a huge problem, we always have to balance two things: knowledge and action.

And sometimes it's very difficult to know, you know, when it's time for knowledge and when it's time for action.

(mellow music) Nelson and his colleagues take these questions seriously.

♪ But communities around the world have decided that the benefits of controlling Dengue are worth a degree of calculated risk.

(soft music) Time and again, we turn to biocontrol when we have big problems to solve.

But some of those problems seem self-inflicted.

(whooshing) Crop pests thriving in our industrialized food system.

(energetic music) Ecosystems ravaged by species we've introduced.

♪ And diseases perpetuated by our modern ways of living.

♪ We act like these problems must have technical solutions.

But maybe there's another way.

(whooshing) (Dru) People often ask us, "Why do your carrots taste so good?"

And I'm a big believer that our carrots taste like the love that is in the soil here.

(Paul) Phew.

I'm gonna be thinking about that for a very long time.

("California Love" by 2Pac and Dr. Dre) ♪ (bike bell rings) (Dr. Dre) ♪ Now let me welcome everybody to the Wild Wild West ♪ (Shane) This is Dru Rivers.

She and her husband Paul are co-founders of Full Belly Farm here in California's Central Valley.

(liquid pouring) They might look sweet and harmless, but on cribbage night, it's a whole other story.

(Dr. Dre) ♪ And pimps be on a mission for them greens ♪ ♪ Lean mean money-making machines servin' fiends ♪ (Shane) Dru and Paul started farming here in 1984.

And right from the start, they wanted to do something different.

(Roger Troutman) ♪ California ♪♪ (Paul) We watched a lot of farms run by good farmers, that were family farms, go out of business because they depended on a model of having one or two crops, and weren't diversified.

So, we grow how many crops?

(Dru) Um, probably a little over a hundred different crops.

-Wow!

-Yeah.

(mellow music) (Shane) All this variety doesn't just protect Full Belly Farm from volatile markets.

It also keeps the farm productive all year long.

(Paul) We grow plants that feed soil, and we grow plants that feed us.

We want to make a healthy ecosystem here that we're part of, and we enjoy being part of.

(Shane) But even on this super-diverse farm, not every species is welcome.

(Paul) Pests can be devastating, right?

But what those pests are indicators of, oftentimes, are of unhealthy ecosystems, right?

(Dru) Yeah.

(Shane) For example, monocultures, vast expanses of a single crop, are particularly vulnerable to pests and diseases.

(soft, tense music) But the diversity on this farm fosters a kind of preventative pest control.

(mellow music) ♪ Consider Dru's gorgeous fields of flowers.

♪ They're more than just another crop to sell.

(Dru) The other thing that the flowers do for us is provide this habitat, amazing habitat for all these beneficial insects.

(bee buzzing) ♪ Here's a lacewing right there.

This is a great example of a really beneficial insect coming in and loving-- loving the marigolds.

Um, and that lacewing could then go over to our broccoli field and eat the aphids that we don't want.

(Shane) And the spaces in between the crops have a purpose, too.

(Dru) One of the things we've done starting from the first year we were here is planting hedgerows around the farm.

Having that un-tilled ground around the farm also encourages places where snakes can live, foxes can live, all of which are beneficial to us.

(cow moos) (Shane) Biologists have a name for this holistic approach to pest management: "conservation biocontrol."

(bee buzzing) It's about making space for all of our allies that already live here.

Choosing nature's rich web of ecological checks and balances over a narrow technical fix.

(birds chirping) (wings flapping) It's almost as though, like, you're not the only farmers here.

All of these other species are also doing their part.

(Paul) Absolutely, the farm has been the teacher.

(Shane) Mm.

Do the natural enemies that you invite in to control sort of what we call pest species, are they taking care of it?

(Paul) You're never gonna have a 100% clean field, but we probably have a 98% clean field.

-Whoa.

-You know, our stuff is really clean.

I mean, we can't send produce to market that's damaged by insects.

(mellow music) (Shane) Conservation biocontrol isn't a panacea for pests.

♪ There's still a role for targeted releases of traditional biocontrols.

But by embracing the idea of the farm as an ecosystem, Paul and Dru are getting a helping hand from nature.

And their approach works for them, in more ways than one.

♪ (Dru) Of the whole 40 years that I've been here, I've never had a day where I didn't feel like I was doing the right thing in my life.

And I--I feel like as a species, more people need to have that in their life, that conviction of rightness in what they do.

(Shane) That's so profound.

♪ Conservation biocontrol means letting a little more nature into our highly curated spaces.

It means placing trust not just in our own ingenuity but in ecological machinery eons in the making.

And it's a lesson that has implications beyond the farm.

("What They Do" by The Roots) Seeing this version of biocontrol, I think it's really beautiful in its simplicity.

Being wise enough to know when the solution was the thing that existed before you got there.

And being wise enough to at least try to put that system back together.

(Black Thought) ♪ Lost generation, fast-paced nation ♪ ♪ World population confront they frustration ♪♪ (Shane) One little farm in California isn't a solution to global problems, but it's a reminder that technical fixes aren't the only tools we've got.

Humans are amazing problem solvers, but part of our genius is also knowing when to stand down and let nature help.

♪ (soft music) (Martha) There is no deeper thing to know and understand in human history than to understand our relationship with nature.

It's not the backdrop to the human story.

It's a main character in the human story.

And it is only by understanding that relationship that we will be able to thrive as a species into the future.

(mellow music) -(birds chirping) -(insects chirring) (Shane) We didn't conquer this planet alone.

And as we reckon with an ever-changing future, our alliances will be more important than ever.

♪ So, we should remember the triumphs and tragedies of the past... (mellow music) ...weigh the risk of action and the cost of inaction... ♪ ...and resist the all-too-human urge to innovate our way out of every problem.

♪ Because if there's one thing biocontrol can teach us, it's that we have extraordinary allies in the Tree of Life... (whooshing) ...and we rise or fall together.

♪ ♪ (female announcer) This program is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

♪

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Human Footprint | The Enemy of My Enemy | Season 2 | Episode 2

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We enlist allies from nature to fight in our battles. But is the enemy of an enemy always a friend?

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HAGA CLIC AQUÍ PARA INFORMACIÓN EN ESPAÑOL

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Do You Hear That? It's the Buzz About Sterile Insect Technique for Mosquito Management

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Do You Hear That? It's the Buzz About Sterile Insect Technique for Mosquito Management

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One of the most recognizable sounds of summer is the high-pitched buzzzzzz of a mosquito-and one of the most common human reactions to this sound is wildly slapping at it, trying to find and eliminate said mosquito before being bitten. But why? It's just a little bug, right? Well, in addition to their bites being itchy and annoying, mosquitoes can carry several high-profile and deadly human diseases, including yellow fever, dengue fever, malaria, West Nile virus, and the Zika virus. These are globally important diseases, and sadly not everyone has access to adequate treatment options.

Aedes aegypti is one of the most common mosquitoes worldwide and can spread several of the aforementioned diseases. An enormous amount of effort has gone into learning about A. aegypti's biology, ecology, and management, and we've made great strides in knowing how to reduce populations of this pest. Some of these tactics are so commonly known they're basically mosquito control 101, like reducing or eliminating areas where mosquitoes can breed (like small pools of water that collect in old tires, or unused swimming pools) or using any one of several insecticide treatments (synthetic active ingredients like permethrin, or biological control agents such as Bacillus thuringiensis var. israliensis).

While there's no downside to eliminating mosquito breeding locations, there are some potential downsides (in the form of negative impacts to humans or the environment) associated with several chemical management options. This, along with an increase in global regulations surrounding pesticide use, has prompted scientists and managers to evaluate different mosquito management tactics.

In an article published in April in the Journal of Integrated Pest Management, a group of researchers at the University of California, Merced reviews one of these novel mosquito management strategies: the sterile insect technique (SIT). This technique is elegant in its simplicity in that males are raised in labs in large numbers, sterilized, and released to mate with wild female mosquitoes. Since the males are sterilized, no viable eggs are produced, and- presto! -mosquito populations dwindle, as does the risk of contracting one of those nasty diseases.

Traditional SIT does have some challenges, however, including the need to optimize rearing protocols and the use of chemicals to sterilize the males. However, a newer technique (called incompatible insect technique, or IIT) uses the Wolbachia bacteria to infect and sterilize pupae or adults. This method of sterilization is more consistent and reliable than chemical methods and has proven very effective in field trials.

As with anything, of course, challenges remain. First is to ensure that rearing protocols are effective and can produce the quantity of treated insects needed for IIT to work. This technique relies on releasing so many treated males that the area is essentially inundated with them, tipping the odds of mating in their favor over untreated wild males. Second, as with any new technology, convincing the public that this is a safe technique is paramount to its acceptance and ultimate utility as a viable management technique. Some may think these are genetically modified (they aren't), and the dreaded "GMO" label may be inappropriately slapped on. This label, unfortunately, often comes with much public discourse and resistance. Effective communication is crucial to help the public understand what is actually happening and how it can benefit them.

Mosquitoes aren't going away, and it behooves us to evaluate any and all possible management techniques-because mosquito bites are annoying enough without the associated threat of a deadly disease.
David Coyle, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Conservation at Clemson University. Socials: @drdavecoyle. Email: dcoyle@clemson.edu.

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Do You Hear That? It's the Buzz About Sterile Insect Technique for Mosquito Management

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Sterilizing and releasing male mosquitoes into the wild to mate with females can reduce mosquito populations. A new review in the Journal of Integrated Pest Management details forms of the sterile insect technique and highlights both the benefits and challenges in deploying it for mosquito management.

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Sterile Insect Technique or Techniques (SIT) is a way to control insects that can spread diseases, including some types of mosquitoes. The technology has been used since the 1950s, but in the United States, SIT for mosquito control is relatively new.

SITs have been used in the United States and around the world since the 1950s to control insect pests. For example, SITs have been used to control Mediterranean fruit fly (Medfly) in Southern California since the 1990s. SIT was also used to eradicate screwworm flies in North and Central America.

How does it work?

SIT targets specific types or species of mosquitoes (such as Aedes aegypti or Aedes albopictus). Generally, SITs for mosquitoes involve three steps: mass production of mosquitoes, sorting males from females, then mass release of male mosquitoes into an area. These steps may differ depending on the type of SIT.

Male mosquitoes do not bite. Male mosquitoes do not spread diseases.

To be successful, the male SIT mosquitoes released into an area must largely outnumber wild male mosquitoes. Once released, male mosquitoes mate with wild females, and because of sterility, no offspring are produced. Over time, the numbers of the targeted mosquito species in the area are reduced.

SIT mosquitoes cannot reproduce in the wild. Therefore, once SIT male mosquitoes stop being released into an area, the specific species of mosquito being targeted will, over time, return to normal.

SITs for mosquito control can be used as part of an integrated vector management approach. SIT may be a preferred way to reduce numbers of mosquitoes in areas where use of insecticides is not possible, not supported by a community, or where insecticide-resistance has reduced the effectiveness of insecticides.

Sterile Insect Technique in San Gabriel Valley

The San Gabriel Valley Mosquito & Vector Control District supports the evaluation and research of SIT. Federal and State regulatory agencies will determine the safety of innovative approaches in California. Our agency may evaluate the use of these technologies only after its been approved.

Currently, no mosquitoes are being released using SIT in San Gabriel Valley.

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Sterile Insect Technique or Techniques (SIT) is a way to control insects that can spread diseases, including some types of mosquitoes. The technology has been used since the 1950s, but in the United States, SIT for mosquito control is relatively new.

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The U.S. is unprepared for the growing threat of mosquito- and tick-borne viruses (NPR)

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The U.S. is unprepared for the growing threat of mosquito- and tick-borne viruses (NPR)

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In the 1970's and '80's, Aedes albopictus mosquitoes came to the U.S. through the used tire trade. These stowaway insects, also known as Asian tiger mosquitoes, can carry viruses like dengue, Zika and chikungunya. They quickly adapted to city life in the southern, eastern and western U.S.

Since then, due to globalization and climate change, insects and the diseases they carry are spreading more widely around the world.

At a two-day workshop this week at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine in Washington, D.C., global public health experts warned that countries like the U.S. are not ready for this looming threat.

"If we don't do anything, which is basically what we're doing right now, it's going to get worse," Tom Scott, a medical entomologist and professor emeritus at UC Davis, said during the workshop. "The damage from inaction is enormous, it's unacceptable. It's unethical."

The workshop focused on arboviral threats, which are mosquito- and tick-borne viruses that can cause harm to humans.

Tropical diseases that were once considered far away from the U.S. are becoming a presence. This year, the U.S. saw locally transmitted cases of malaria and a skin disease from tropical parasites. A Zika outbreak occurred in Florida and Texas in 2016-2017 and dengue has spread locally in the U.S. every year for over a decade.

The signs have long been obvious to tropical disease researchers.

"We don't pay enough attention in the United States to what is going on in other countries. We just kind of watch it spread and we don't prepare ourselves for that virus potentially coming to the U.S.," Laura Kramer, director of the Arbovirus Laboratory at State University of New York at Albany, told the workshop attendees. "That happened with Zika, chikungunya and West Nile."

Researchers at the workshop said countries like the U.S. can expect more tropical diseases to come - and should be preparing for them. Global warming is expanding the range of some tropical insects and diseases.

But the U.S. has lost a lot of its capacity to track insects. In 1927, every state had its own entomologist working to control insect populations and malaria, Erin Staples, a medical epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during the workshop.

"Where are we now in 2022? We've got sixteen state entomologists." That means the nation's ability to monitor viruses like West Nile is sparse. "We're not getting great information because we haven't maintained our infrastructure," Staples said.

So what should the U.S. be doing?

Public health researchers say Singapore is a shining example of mosquito control. The country has cut the number of mosquitoes - vectors for viruses such as dengue and Zika - by cleaning up the city environment and teaching good practices from a very young age. "My four-year-old daughter will come home and tell me about vector control because she learned it in kindergarten," said Lee-Ching Ng, with the Singapore government's Environmental Health Institute.

Singapore also has a big, expensive surveillance program, which tracks dengue cases by neighborhood and sends phone alerts when cases are high. And residents in Singapore can be fined or jailed for harboring mosquito breeding sites at home. Peter Daszak, president of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, described Singapore's approach as "the carrot and the stick."

"There is a willingness to [take action in Singapore,] and they've done it and it works," he said. Still, that approach may not work in other countries such as the U.S., "where we're seeing pushback after COVID against all forms of intervention to people's personal freedom," he said.

Other tools could work, such as vaccines - which currently exist against some of these diseases. And designing cities in ways that are mosquito-proof.

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The U.S. is unprepared for the growing threat of mosquito- and tick-borne viruses

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Experts warn that new tropical viruses are headed for the U.S. - and the country should take active measures to fend them off.

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Why are they releasing millions of mosquitoes in Hawaii? (PBS)

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Why are they releasing millions of mosquitoes in Hawaii? (PBS)

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Why are they releasing millions of mosquitoes in Hawaii?

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New gene-editing tools may help wipe out mosquito-borne diseases (NPR)

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New gene-editing tools may help wipe out mosquito-borne diseases (NPR)

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MIAMI - In the age-old war of human versus mosquitoes, the bugs have been winning.

At least 700,000 people die every year from mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, West Nile and yellow fever.

Global trade and climate change have helped disease-carrying species become established in places like Florida, California and Texas. In parts of the U.S., dengue is now a persistent problem. Last year, for the first time in decades, Florida and Texas reported locally-acquired malaria cases. Maryland also had a case.

But by using bioengineering, scientists have developed tools they believe may help control and possibly eradicate mosquitoes that carry dengue, malaria and other diseases. Andrea Leal, the head of mosquito control in the Florida Keys says, "The good news is we've got these emerging technologies that show great promise in reducing Aedes aegypti mosquitoes."

The Aedes aegypti mosquito loves to feed on people and it's become a significant health threat across the southern U.S. Leal's agency became the first in this country to partner with a company, Oxitec, that's testing a new means of mosquito control.

Using gene editing, Oxitec has developed male mosquitoes that, when they mate, produce female offspring that don't survive to adulthood. Females are the mosquitoes that bite, spreading dengue and other diseases.

Over the last three years, Oxitec released limited numbers of its bioengineered male mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. Oxitec hasn't released the results of those trials yet. But, in a 2022 study in Brazil, the company showed the technology reduced populations over 90% in some areas. Brazil approved Oxitec's request to market it commercially.

The company's CEO Grey Frandsen says, "Now the product is being deployed in every state in Brazil, including in the heart of the Amazon where the Amazon tourism authority has selected Oxitec to deploy around tourism sites because they are, in essence, rejecting the need to deploy chemical pesticides."

Along with Oxitec, many research organizations are now focused on using gene editing to combat mosquitoes. A major plus is it can be used on any species, including those that transmit malaria. Oxitec is working on three species of malaria mosquitoes and is in talks about conducting trials in Uganda.

Eric Caragata, an entomologist at the University of Florida, says there's growing evidence that gene editing technology will be an important tool in reducing the spread of dengue, malaria and other diseases. "If you use a product like that," he says, "you have the potential to drastically reduce the number of mosquitoes that are in an area and hopefully that would be accompanied by a decrease in the number of cases."

At the University of California San Diego, Omar Akbari is using gene editing to target a mosquito species that carries malaria. He calls gene editing a "game changer" that he believes if scaled up and maintained, can wipe out the Aedes aegypti mosquito from North America. "I think it's going to be difficult but I don't think it's impossible," he says, "because they have been eradicated before using insecticides. And these are new technologies."

In the U.S. and elsewhere, there's been public resistance and concerns about the possible environmental impact of releasing bioengineered mosquitoes. The three years of trials in the Keys were conducted to show state and federal regulators that the technology is environmentally safe and effective. And in recent years, Frandsen has seen a shift in the questions his staff gets from the public. He says, "The question is no longer 'Do these technologies have a role?' 'Are these technologies appropriate for communities?'" he says. "The questions we're getting now is 'How quickly can we get these technologies to new communities that need it the most?'"

Oxitec is hoping to receive approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and make its mosquito control technology available commercially in the U.S. within the next two years.

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New gene-editing tools may help wipe out mosquito-borne diseases

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Scientists say gene-editing technology may eradicate a mosquito in the U.S. that spreads dengue and other diseases. Concerns remain about the possible environmental impact of bioengineered mosquitoes.

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The malaria vaccine that just rolled out has a surprise benefit for kids (NPR)

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The malaria vaccine that just rolled out has a surprise benefit for kids (NPR)

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The malaria vaccine that just rolled out has a surprise benefit for kids

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A new malaria vaccine came to Cameroon this week and will be introduced in 20 additional countries. Experts stress that it’s not a magic bullet. But they say it’s a game-changer — with a bonus.

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With a million cases of dengue so far this year, Brazil is in a state of emergency

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With a million cases of dengue so far this year, Brazil is in a state of emergency

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It was 3 a.m. on Feb. 6 when the dengue field hospital in Brasília temporarily shut its doors.

The generator powering the medical facility had blown and the 29 members of the Brazilian Air Force in charge had to change it before they could see patients again. Medical professionals who'd been trained to care for dengue patients, they expected to attend to up to 600 people with suspected cases per day. In the first 24 hours after the doors opened on Feb. 5, they saw 1,300. The generator couldn't keep up.

As they worked through the middle of the night and into the wee hours of the morning to get power back to the tents set up next to the neighborhood emergency care unit, a new linestarted to form. By the time the new generator was in place at 8 a.m., some people had been waiting for hours, sitting on the ground in an attempt to stave off dizziness, headache and body aches from a disease so painful it's known as "breakbone fever."

Just two days later, there was an explosion in the number of confirmed dengue cases in the Federal District, where Brasilia is situated. That Brazilian state had issued an emergency decree two weeks earlier because of the havoc the mosquito-borne disease was wreaking on its population. In the midst of an unprecedented dengue outbreak that began in 2022, the Federal District is the Brazilian state most affected this year. By Feb. 17, it surpassed 72,600 confirmed cases - which was the total for all of 2023.

At least six Brazilian states in addition to the Federal District are facing dengue epidemics and 17 cities have declared a state of emergency as the country has already registered 1 million cases of dengue in the first two months of 2024, more than half the 1.6 million cases confirmed last year - which was already almost 18% higher than in 2022. The fatality count in those same two months was 214.

As a result, Brazil's public health-care system, known as SUS, has been grappling to keep up, resorting to field hospitals like the one in Brasília and tents in strategic points around its cities to triage patients with suspected cases of dengue.

While caring for those who are already ill, Brazil continues to tackle prevention with its usual methods: using a fog machine to kill mosquitoes by spraying fine droplets with low concentrations of insecticides mixed with water and running campaigns to remind people how to avoid a bite from dengue-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes (using bug spray, keeping stagnant water out of homes and wearing long sleeves and pants are all helpful), where the species breeds (it's important to remove stagnant water and anything that collects it from homes) and what to do if symptoms arise (don't self-medicate - make sure to see a doctor for diagnosis and treatment).

Brazil's not the only place where dengue is running rampant. Nearby Peru is in the throes of an epidemic. Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam have also seen dengue spike dramatically. Niger, a subtropical country, reported its first case of the disease in 2022. And in the last year, high-heat states like Texas, Florida and California have seen a smattering of unexpected cases of dengue.

The mosquito-borne viral disease - which causes symptoms like fever, rash, muscle and joint pain in mild cases and can lead to persistent vomiting, bleeding from the gums and nose, difficulty breathing and death when it becomes hemorrhagic - had only occurred in seven countries before 1970. But over the last 20 years, the World Health Organization reports the number of yearly dengue cases has increased by eight times with 100 to 400 million registered worldwide every year. Now, roughly half the world's population is at risk of infection.

Why is dengue making such unprecedented strides?

The answer lies in the method of transmission - and the changing environment of Earth.

Dengue is transmitted to humans in tropical and subtropical climates through the bite of infected female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. The species prefers to live and breed in urban and semi-urban areas because of its need for human blood in the egg-production process. Those eggs, laid on the surface of stagnant water, can be found in construction sites, tire shops, cemeteries, abandoned swimming pools, plant pots and anyplace else where water collects.

The mosquitoes are thriving in areas where climate change has made temperatures higher and precipitation more abundant than in the past - this species likes it hot and humid. In the last handful of years, migration, urbanization and other socioeconomic issues have also all played a hand in providing ideal conditions for the spread of Aedes aegypti and the dengue it can carry.

So it's not enough to tell people to get rid of standing water and be more fastidious with their use of bug spray. And in its response to this unprecedented outbreak, Brazil has become a test case: experimenting with other interventions to prevent a dengue-ridden future.

A vaccine roll-out

In February, Brazil's public health-care system started rolling out Japan's two-dose Qdenga vaccine - already available on the private market in several countries in Europe, the U.K., Indonesia and Thailand, as well as private and public programs in Argentina - in the country's first attempt to immunize the most vulnerable members of the population against dengue. During clinical trials, the vaccine's efficacy was 80% one year after the second dose was administered.

The Butantan Institute, a biological research center located in São Paulo, is also developing a vaccine to prevent all four variations of the mosquito-borne disease. In its most recent clinical trials, conducted across Brazil from 2013 to 2015, the single-dose vaccine protected 79.6% of those immunized - including both those who have and have not had dengue before.

But dengue vaccines have a controversial history. While Brazil hasn't taken steps to vaccinate its population against dengue until now, the Philippines did attempt to immunize children across the country in 2016. The vaccination campaign went horribly wrong, with at least 10 deaths blamed on the vaccine, which seemed to increase the risk of plasma leakage syndrome, a complication in which blood vessels leak blood's yellow fluid, in children who had never been exposed to dengue before. The tragedy left the population cautious about new dengue vaccines.

But experts are optimistic that safer options are to come.

"The new vaccines are made in a different way, so I would hope they don't have the same effect [as the vaccine used in the Philippines]," says André Siqueira, an infectious-disease expert and febrile-illness researcher at Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) who is not involved in the development of any of the vaccines. "They're very promising. But they need to be strictly observed and monitored."

A mosquito biofactory: infecting them with a bacteria

Other solutions focus on the mosquito. Brazil has been working with the World Mosquito Program for over a decade and, in collaboration with Fiocruz, is building a mosquito biofactory.

The project, called Wolbito, will produce mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia, a bacteria found naturally in the majority of insects (including other types of mosquitoes) but not in Aedes aegypti. When scientists insert the bacteria into the species' eggs, it should have a number of beneficial results.

First, a virus can no longer replicate inside a mosquito born from those eggs - so the mosquitoes can't transmit the dengue virus.

Second, females carrying Wolbachia pass the bacteria on to their descendants, so there's a continuing impact.

And third, any males with it make females they mate with incapable of laying eggs.

When Wolbachia is established in a mosquito population (after scientists release mosquitoes from the factory and plant eggs with the bacteria around a community) it should mean a decrease in incidences of dengue, among other mosquito-borne diseases, according to Neelika Malavige, who is not affiliated with the biofactory and is head of Dengue Global Program and Scientific Affairs at the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi).

"The Wolbachia method is one of the best interventions for vector control so far," says Malavige. "Since it's a biological method, the harm to the environment by chemical fogging is eliminated. So far the trials have shown very promising results, but we need to further understand the costs involved in implementing this method in low- and middle-income countries to determine if it's affordable and we also need to better understand how this technology can be transferred to the countries."

When it's ready next year, the mosquito biofactory will be able to produce 400 million Wolbachia eggs a month for Aedes aegypti - the species that can carry and spread not only dengue but also yellow fever, chikungunya and zika.

"The number of dengue cases have shot up," says Luciano Moreira, a senior research scientist at Fiocruz and project lead of the World Mosquito Program in Brazil. "With our biofactory, we project that, in 10 years, we will be able to protect around 70 million people in several cities across Brazil."

Malavige agrees with Moreira that the process might not be quick, but the method has shown promise.

So far, Wolbito has released mosquitoes in five municipalities around the country, with plans to add another six this year. The team of experts first takes two to four weeks to talk to the communities about what it wants to do - and the benefits.

Residents often have a lot of questions. They want to know if the bacteria could contaminate the environment when the mosquito dies (no, when the mosquito dies at the end of its lifespan the bacteria dies with it), if Wolbachia passes to humans when they're bitten (it doesn't) and if the process genetically modifies the mosquitoes (no, their genes stay the same). One downside is an initial increase in mosquitoes when those with Wolbachia join the local population, but that only causes some annoyance because of mosquito bites.

Once they have permission from people living in the community, the scientists take to the streets for four to six weeks, driving or walking around with containers full of Aedes aegypti with Wolbachia to release in strategic points of the city. They also hang open containers of eggs from trees, allowing Wolbachia mosquitoes to hatch in the local habitat.

"It's not a method that allows you to see change from one day to the next," says Moreira. "But it is self-sustaining.

"In some areas of Brazil where we released our mosquitoes more than eight years ago, more than 90% of the population still has Wolbachia."

The project has only been carried out in a handful of Brazilian cities, which is why dengue outbreaks have led to epidemics in many places that don't yet work with Wolbito.

But in the cities where it's been working, the scientists have seen encouraging results. Niteroi, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, started with Wolbito in 2015 and, just last year, became the first city to release Wolbachia mosquitoes in all of its neighborhoods. According to its secretariat of health, the city has seen a 70% reduction in its number of dengue cases following the implementation of the program (there were 158 cases in 2015 and 55 in 2023) and has not seen a spike during this latest surge.

Sterilized males dropped by drone

Another method being used in Brazil to curb the Aedes aegypti population is the release of male mosquitoes sterilized with nuclear radiation, meaning they can't fertilize eggs.

The males, sterilized at two biofactories in Brazil, are released in the same way as Wolbachia mosquitoes - experts head out on foot and in cars, opening containers in areas known to be Aedes aegypti breeding grounds.

For one company, coming up with a way to distribute sterile mosquitoes more widely was a strategy worth developing.

Called Birdview, the startup originally used drones to release insects that naturally fight agricultural pests, reaching areas of farms that were otherwise difficult to get to and lowering the use of pesticides on crops. Now, it flies drones equipped with insect cassettes into hard-to-reach corners of narrow city neighborhoods. Each of those cassettes, which has a film-covered bottom that slowly opens to release the sterile males, can carry up to 17,000 of them per 10-minute flight that covers roughly 25 acres.

"We're still in pilot mode right now," says Ricardo Machado, engineer and founder of Birdview. "But we're ready and eager to do this in larger areas. And eventually we want to decentralize the process, training local people to fly the drones so that communities can be self-sufficient, the cost can be kept low and jobs can be created."

As the number of cases of dengue across Brazil continues to tick upward, the field hospital in Brasília has gotten its operations under control. But lines of people with suspected cases of dengue continue to be in the thousands, so the Federal District upped the number of individual dengue tents around the city - another way to triage patients that is complementary to the hospital and its permanent health-care units - from nine to 20.

It's a cautionary tale for the world as dengue continues to spread.

"It's not like measles, where you give a vaccine and it's end-of-story," says Malavige. "Look at COVID. We have vaccines, we have drugs, and when things get really bad and there's an outbreak, governments ask people to mask up again. For dengue it's the same. We have to have multiple strategies."

Jill Langlois is an independent journalist based in São Paulo, Brazil. She has been freelancing from the largest city in the western hemisphere since 2010, writing and reporting for publications like National Geographic, The New York Times, The Guardian and Time. Her work focuses on human rights, the environment and the impact of socioeconomic issues on people's lives.

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With a million cases of dengue so far this year, Brazil is in a state of emergency

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Brazil looks to short-term and long-term strategies to fight a disease so painful it's known as "breakbone fever." The outbreak is part of a global wave of dengue triggered in part by climate change.

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Educating for Misunderstanding: How Approaches to Teaching Digital Literacy Make Students Susceptible to Scammers, Rogues, Bad Actors, and Hate Mongers

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Introduction
 Russian troll farms sow disinformation. Fake news runs amok on social media. Bots impersonate real people. Real people assume false identities. How do we know what's true? The onl...

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District staff worked quickly to expand surveillance by deploying additional traps and increasing the frequency of testing to identify the presence of mosquito-transmitted diseases in local mosquito populations, according to the Vector Control District's Oct. 21, 2023 statement. [From San Gabriel Valley Mosquito & Vector Control District archival photo]

On Saturday the San Gabriel Valley Mosquito & Vector Control District said in a statement it is working collaboratively with the Pasadena Public Health Department to mount additional surveillance, mosquito control, and educational outreach in the Pasadena neighborhood where a locally acquired case of Dengue was confirmed.

Pasadena health officials Friday reported an "extremely rare" case of local transmission of the mosquito-borne dengue virus, the first known case in California to occur in a person who had not recently traveled.

"Pasadena Public Health Department has been conducting surveillance and investigation of mosquito-borne diseases in Pasadena for years," Dr. Matthew Feaster, an epidemiologist with the Pasadena Public Health Department, said in a statement. "Our work so far, in partnership with the Vector Control District, gives us confidence that this was likely an isolated incident and that there is very low risk of additional dengue exposure in Pasadena."

On Saturday, the Vector Control District reported that testing of locally captured mosquitoes had not identified any Dengue-infected mosquitoes.

District staff worked quickly to expand surveillance by deploying additional traps and increasing the testing frequency to identify the presence of mosquito-transmitted diseases in local mosquito populations, according to the Vector Control District's statement.

Additionally, the District said its field staff have conducted property inspections to reduce mosquito breeding sources and performed mosquito control treatments in the area.

District representatives were to start conducting property inspections in the area last weekend.

San Gabriel Valley Mosquito & Vector Control District representatives will be available to answer any questions or concerns relating to mosquito activity. They can be reached at (626) 814-9466, online at www.sgvmosquito.org , or through social media.

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Vector Control District Ramps Up Surveillance, Goes Door-to-Door in Pasadena Following Rare Case of Dengue

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Daily Newsmagazine and City Guide to Pasadena, California featuring local news, breaking news, events, weather, sports news, schools news, shopping, restaurants and more from Pasadena Now

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Painful Dengue May ‘Take Off’ In United States—What To Know About The ‘Breakbone Fever’ Virus

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Painful Dengue May ‘Take Off’ In United States—What To Know About The ‘Breakbone Fever’ Virus

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Topline

The World Health Organization's chief scientist Jeremy Farrar has warned dengue fever could soon "take off" and become a constant presence in the United States, one of many emerging health threats driven by the climate crisis as rising temperatures make new parts of the world hospitable to vectors of disease.

Female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes can spread dengue.
Getty Images

Key Facts

Dengue-often called "breakbone fever" on account of the excruciating pain it can cause-is caused by a virus spread through the bites of infected female mosquitoes, primarily the invasive Aedes aegypti.

Dengue is common in warmer climates where the mosquitoes that spread it thrive, including parts of South America, South Asia and the Philippines.

There are four related viruses that cause dengue and around 400 million people are infected every year, though experts believe this number is likely much higher as most people will not have any symptoms.

Around a quarter of people with dengue will get sick and experience flu-like symptoms such as fever, headache, rash, aches and pains and vomiting that typically begin a few days after infection and last a week or two.

Dengue can become a medical emergency within a matter of hours, however, with around 1 in 20 of infected people who get sick developing serious symptoms like severe pain, shock and internal bleeding that can lead to death, and around 40,000 die from severe dengue each year.

There is no specific medicine to treat dengue and the focus in most cases is on treating pain and providing supportive care, with severe dengue often requiring hospitalization.

Preventing mosquito bites through guards like screens, netting, repellent and environmental management is the primary way of preventing infection with dengue, though a vaccine for those who haven't been infected previously-there is a vaccine for people who have already had a confirmed infection-is now available, albeit not universally. (The company withdrew its application to be authorized in the U.S.)

News Peg

Farrar, who joined the WHO from the Wellcome Trust in May, told Reuters in an interview that the world needs "to talk much more proactively about dengue" and that many countries need to prepare themselves for the added pressure coming their way. Parts of the U.S., Europe and Africa-all areas where local transmission of dengue have been documented in the past-are particularly susceptible runways from which the virus can "take off" and become endemic, he said, meaning the virus will be a continued presence.

Key Background

Climate change-in addition to increased city living and global movement of people-is a key driver of dengue as it expands the areas hospitable to Aedes aegypti and other mosquitoes like Aedes albopictus that can transmit the virus. These typically live in warmer environments and estimates suggest climate change will soon make large parts-or even all-of the U.S. suitable habitat for the insects, increasing the risk of dengue and other diseases the same mosquitoes carry like Zika, yellow fever and chikungunya. There have already been outbreaks of dengue with local transmission reported in Florida, Hawaii, Texas and Arizona, though most U.S. cases are linked to travelers and previous outbreaks have been small, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. With the vector mosquitoes present, it would only take one infected person to be bitten to kick start a local chain of transmission. Such fears have sparked insecticide campaigns in places like Paris, where officials worried two people who contracted the virus abroad could start an outbreak given the more extreme conditions and heat that have allowed the mosquitoes to thrive in the city. Extreme weather, set to get worse with climate change, is also being blamed for the severity of an ongoing dengue outbreak in Bangladesh, where more than 1,000 people have already died.

Surprising Fact

Infection with one type of dengue virus does not grant immunity against other kinds of dengue, and a person can be infected multiple times over the course of their lives. Unlike many infections-which often convey a degree of protection, or are at least neutral, against related viruses- repeat infections with dengue come with a greater risk of severe disease. The issue was a contentious and debated topic among scientists for years but it is now believed that antibodies developed following the first round of infection actually assist the virus if contracted again later.

Further Reading

Dengue will 'take off' in southern Europe, US, Africa this decade, WHO scientist says (Reuters)

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Painful Dengue May 'Take Off' In United States-What To Know About The 'Breakbone Fever' Virus

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Four states-Florida, Hawaii, Texas and Arizona-have already documented locally acquired cases of dengue, which is also known as "breakbone fever" on account of the severe pain it causes.

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For decades, the world seemed to be winning the war against mosquitoes and tamping down the deadly diseases they carried. But in the past few years, progress has not only stalled, it has reversed. Stephanie Nolen, who covers global health for The Times, explains how the mosquito has once again gained the upper hand in the fight.

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‎The Daily: The Mosquitoes Are Winning on Apple Podcasts

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For decades, the world seemed to be winning the war against mosquitoes and tamping down the deadly diseases they carried. But in the past few years, progress has not only stalled, it has reversed. Stephanie Nolen, who covers global health for The Times, explains how the mosquito has once again gaine...

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Health officials warn painful disease will become a major threat this decade: ‘We need to really prepare’

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Health officials warn painful disease will become a major threat this decade: ‘We need to really prepare’

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The chief scientist from the World Health Organization is warning that Earth's rising temperature will make dengue fever a massive threat within this decade.

What's happening?

The chief scientist from WHO has reported that dengue fever is expected to have a massive impact on Europe, the United States, and new regions in Africa within a decade, according to EuroNews.Green. The infection is carried by mosquitoes, which are projected to be affected by rising global temperatures, driving the insects into territories that they haven't previously inhabited.

Why is dengue fever concerning?

In Latin America and Asia, dengue fever causes as many as 20,000 deaths every year - and since 2000, the global rate of the disease has increased eight times over, thanks in large part to the dangerous overheating of the planet, per EuroNews.Green.

The outlet notes that 4.2 million cases of the disease were reported last year and that officials expect 2023 may see a number close to the record amount of cases. Additionally, it's important to note that a significant portion of dengue fever cases end up unreported.

Dengue fever is also referred to as "break-bone fever" due to the muscle spasms and joint pain that it causes. Most dengue patients are asymptomatic, which makes it difficult to track and prevent outbreaks and transmission.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around 5% of people infected end up developing a severe case of the disease, and less than 1% of cases overall are fatal, when properly diagnosed and treated, per Medscape.

Pregnant people, children, and prior dengue patients are at higher risk than other segments of the population, EuroNews.Green reported.

What's being done to combat dengue fever?

There is a vaccine for dengue fever available. WHO recommends children between the ages of six and 16 receive Takeda Pharmaceuticals' Qdenga vaccine in regions affected by the disease.

Additionally, experts believe that public funding for mosquito control and planning for hospital triaging will help reduce the impact of the disease, per EuroNews.Green. The most impactful strategy you can employ to prevent the disease is eliminating standing water in and around your home, as standing water attracts mosquitoes.

"We need to talk much more proactively about dengue," Jeremy Farrar, the chief scientist and an infectious disease specialist with WHO, said, according to EuroNews. "We need to really prepare countries for how they will deal with the additional pressure that will come ... in the future in many, many big cities."

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Health officials warn painful disease will become a major threat this decade: 'We need to really prepare'

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"We need to talk much more proactively ..."

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Chikungunya vaccine: US approves first shot against mosquito-borne virus

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Chikungunya vaccine: US approves first shot against mosquito-borne virus

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Chikungunya vaccine: US approves first shot against mosquito-borne virus

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The mosquito-borne disease, which can be fatal to newborns, has killed at least 350 people this year.

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https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-016-0305-y/figures/1

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Insects employ an open circulatory system for the transport of nutrients, wastes, and signaling molecules throughout the body. The insect circulatory system also functions in thermoregulation, promoting ventilation through the tracheal system, and the circulation of humoral immune molecules and immune blood cells (hemocytes) that survey tissues for foreign entities.

Recently we completed a comprehensive characterization of the structural and functional mechanics of the mosquito heart, and showed that the primary organ driving hemolymph circulation in mosquitoes is a dorsal vessel that is subdivided into an abdominal heart and a thoracic aorta. The heart is tethered to the midline of the abdominal tergum (dorsal cuticle) by alary muscles, and propels hemolymph at an average velocity of 8 mm/s by sequentially contracting muscle fibers oriented in a helical twist with respect to the lumen of the vessel. The direction in which heart contractions propagate periodically switches direction, and hence, mosquitoes pump their hemolymph in both anterograde (toward the head) and retrograde (toward the posterior abdomen) directions.

Using molecular and imaging techniques, we are currently investigating the hormonal control of heart contractions, the absolute speeds and direction of hemolymph flow in all areas of the insect, and the relative contribution of accessory pulsatile organs in potentiating extracardiac hemolymph propulsion.

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Insects employ an open circulatory system for the transport of nutrients, wastes, and signaling molecules throughout the body. The insect circulatory system also functions in thermoregulation, promoting ventilation through the tracheal system, and the circulation of humoral immune molecules and immune blood cells (hemocytes) that survey tissues for foreign entities.

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Legends of Kingfishers, Otters, and Red-tailed Hawks | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

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Firebrats and silverfish

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Firebrats and Silverfish Are Rocking Some Old-School Looks | Deep Look

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Fantastic Fleas

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A Flea's Fantastic Jump Takes More Than Muscle | Deep Look

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Season 3 Episode 10 | 2m 55s |

Seen up close, the anatomy of a mosquito bite is terrifying. The most dangerous animal in the world uses six needle-like mouthparts to saw into our skin, tap a blood vessel and sometimes leave a dangerous parting gift.

Aired: 07/13/16

Rating: NR

From:

Problems Playing Video? Report a Problem |

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Deep Look | How Mosquitoes Use Six Needles to Suck Your Blood | Season 3 | Episode 10

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Season 3 Episode 10 | 2m 55s | Seen up close, the anatomy of a mosquito bite is terrifying. The most dangerous animal in the world uses six needle-like mouthparts to saw into our skin, tap a blood vessel and sometimes leave a dangerous parting gift. Aired: 07/13/16 Rating: NR Problems Playing Video?

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The loathsome, lethal mosquito - Rose Eveleth

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Why is biodiversity so important? - Kim Preshoff

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2:49

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Do we really need pesticides? - Fernan Pérez-Gálvez

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Watch This Billion-Year Journey of Earth’s Tectonic Plates (Published 2021)

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A new simulation offers a different view of how the continents we live on drifted into their current configuration.

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Reindeer/Caribou adaptation to changes in seasonal light

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Reindeer/Caribou adaptation to changes in seasonal light

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Warning: images of dissection of animal eyes.

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Reindeer may be best known for fictional Rudolph's glowing red nose, but now scientists find the animals can alter color elsewhere as well - the backs of their eyeballs change from gold in the summer to blue in the winter.

This change in color helps reindeer eyes capture more light during the dark winter months in the Arctic, scientists added.
Collection of reindeer eyes
Neuroscientist Glen Jeffery, who investigates vision at University College London, was sent a collection of reindeer eyes from the Arctic 12 years ago, some from reindeer killed in the summer, some in the winter. [ See Photos of Reindeer & Color-Changing Eyes]

"I opened the eyes up on my lab bench and almost fell off my chair," Jeffery said. "The differences were so dramatic, and I knew no one had ever seen anything like that before. However, it has taken us 12 years to slowly find out what is going on and why."

(Image credit: Glen Jeffery)

The quest for an answer involved research teams flying to the Arctic regularly each year.

"The environment can be brutal, with 24 hours light in summer and 24 hours darkness in winter," Jeffery said.

The Sami people herd reindeer in the Arctic, and the scientists often collected eyes from reindeer they bought from Sami herders.

"Thousands of animals would suddenly turn up, and they were all turned into meat in a couple of days, but this would go on miles from anywhere," Jeffery said. "Once, we drove deep inland for about four hours in a 4X4 [truck] close to the winter solstice - had to take a 30-kilometer (18 miles) diversion into Finland because wine is much cheaper there than anywhere else in Scandinavia. Magical trip - hardly saw anyone on the journey."
Reindeer retinas
The scientists investigated a reflective layer behind the retina of the reindeer's eyes. The retina, located on the back of the eyeball, contains the eye's light-sensitive cells.

The color of the light reflected by reindeer eyes is related to the spacing of collagen fibers in the reflective layer, technically known as the tapetum lucidum. Reindeer apparently increase pressure inside the eyeball during the winter to compress these fibers together, and reducing the spacing between these fibers makes the eyes reflect bluer light.

The reflective layer bounces light back through the eye. In the summer, it turns golden in many reindeer, reflecting most light through the retina, helping the reindeer deal with the nearly continuous Arctic summer daylight. However, in the winter, it turns deep blue, reflecting far less light out the eye, helping the reindeer cope with the nearly continuous Arctic winter darkness.

Moreover, the shift to blue may also scatter light through larger numbers of light-sensitive eye cells rather than directly reflecting it out from the eye through fewer numbers of these cells. As such, their eyes end up capturing more light in the winter when they need it most, with a trade-off of less visual sharpness.

These findings are the first known instance of mammal retinas altering their structure due to seasonal changes in environmental light, the researchers say.

"No one has ever seen anything like this in a mammal before, let alone such a large shift," Jeffery said.

The scientists want to further see whether these eye changes also influence how the reindeer see ultraviolet light, which is very rich in Arctic winter light.

"We have some evidence that the blue reflection in winter amplifies ultraviolet light, while in summer it suppresses it," Jeffery said.

In addition, the researchers want to investigate the reflective layers in the eyeballs of other Arctic animals. Surprisingly, the three polar bear eyes the scientists have each possess "the most diminutive tapetum lucidum I've ever seen and unlike any other bear - it's milky with no color. There has to be a reason for that."

The scientists detailed their findings online Oct. 30 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

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Reindeer may be best known for fictional Rudolph's glowing red nose, but now scientists find the animals can alter color elsewhere as well - the backs of their eyeballs change from gold in the summer to blue in the winter. This change in color helps reindeer eyes capture more light during the dark winter months in the Arctic, scientists added.

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Ah yes, kitten season is officially upon us once again. With it comes all the cute descriptions on rescue sites and shelters attaching "probable" breeds to babies that sorta, kinda look like them - all in a bid to make them seem more rare and thus higher in demand for adoption. However, that isn't how it works. A coat color or a fur type alone does not dictate what breed something is.

Siamese is a breed in and of itself - it is based not just on coat color but structure, conformation, pedigree, and other genetics. So having points alone does not make a cat a Siamese nor mean they have a Siamese parent, or any other purebred lineage.
Get ready to learn some really nerdy stuff!
Coat coloring and why it may not mean a kitten/cat is an actual Siamese:

The actual pointed coat coloring that Siamese and other breeds are known for (as well as rats, mice, and rabbits) is simply a recessive form of partial albinism called "Himalayan". It has nothing to do with the specific breed of cat called Himalayan, as that is something entirely separate - other than the fact that the Himalayan breed ALSO has the Himalayan genetic mutation. 😊

The Himalayan mutation alters the enzyme responsible for melanin production, which is called Tyrosinase.

Melanin: any of various black, dark brown, reddish-brown, or yellow pigments of animal or plant structures (such as skin or hair). [ 1]

Tyrosinase: a copper-containing enzyme that promotes the oxidation of phenols (such as tyrosine) and is widespread in plants and animals. [ 2]

Tyrosine: a phenolic amino acid (C9H11NO3) that is a precursor of several important substances such as epinephrine and melanin. [ 3]

The mutation restricts the ability of tyrosinase to oxidize tyrosine only at cooler temperatures; warmer temperatures deactivate the enzyme. This results in little to no melanin production within each hair follicle located over the warmer areas of the body (chest, abdomen, upper legs, neck), and more melanin production in hair follicles over cooler areas of the body (ears, face, paws, tail - the "points").

Because this mutation only creates partial albinism, it overshadows the normal base coat color phenotype that is located on a different allele - i.e. black, blue, red, etc. - while still allowing it to be visible. This is similar to how a person with albinism is still genetically a redhead, or black, or has brown eyes, etc. Since only some areas have the albinism activated, we can still see the cat's normal coat phenotype in the other areas where it is inactivated.

Phenotype: the observable properties of an organism that are produced by the interaction of the genotype and the environment. [ 4]

Genotype: A set of alleles that determine the expression of a particular characteristic or phenotype. [ 5]

Allele: One of a pair of genes occupying a specific spot on a chromosome. That spot is called a locus. [ 6]

For example, a Seal point cat is actually a black cat with the Himalayan mutation altering how the melanin is developed and displayed. A Chocolate point is actually a brown cat, a Flame point is actually an orange cat, etc. Blue points and Lilac points are dilute forms of black and brown; they require an additional separate allele mutation in addition to the albinism mutation in order to make them dilute. Lynx points, Tortoiseshell (Tortie) points, and Showshoes have yet another additional gene being expressed that gives them their stripes, orange streaks, and masks/socks. So for example, a Tortie Blue Point with Snowshoe masks/socks would have THREE mutations creating her pattern. These additional mutations are the same genes as in non-Himalayan mutation cats ("normal" cats), just expressed differently. I won't go into the full cat coat and color genetics explanation, as that will have to be another article on its own!

The Himalayan mutation has a simple recessive hereditary pattern:

Recessive Inheritance: When a trait is recessive, an individual must have two copies of a specific allele to express the trait. Recessive alleles are denoted by a lowercase letter ("a" versus "A"). Only individuals with an "aa" genotype will express a recessive trait; therefore, offspring must receive one recessive allele from each parent to exhibit a recessive trait. [ 7]

Heterozygous: containing two different alleles [or only one copy] for a particular trait at the same locus. [ 8]

Homozygous: containing two copies of the same allele for a particular trait, located at similar positions (loci) on paired chromosomes.

In a diploid organism, there are two sets of chromosomes. One of the sets comes from the biological mother and the other set from the biological father. Each maternal chromosome has a corresponding paternal chromosome to match with based on their loci. When the loci in the matching chromosomes bear the same alleles, it is described as homozygous. When the loci only contain one of the alleles, it is described as heterozygous. [ 9]

This means that it can be genetically carried WITHOUT being phenotypically visible (Heterozygous). Thus two parents of any average coat pattern/type would simply need to each carry one hidden copy of the Himalayan gene to potentially have babies with the visible Himalayan coat pattern. The baby with the mutation would be the Homozygous form with 2 copies of the gene, one inherited from each parent. Since genetics are somewhat of a dice roll when it comes to reproduction, each individual offspring has a different chance of inheriting one or both copies of any given gene. This is why it is possible for babies with the Himalayan mutation to pop up in litters that also have "normal"-appearing siblings.

The Himalayan gene can be carried through the parental lines for decades without any expression until the carrier is mated with a fellow carrier to create a Homozygous (visible) offspring. The trait also happens randomly in spontaneous genetic mutation during DNA replication in the first stages of embryonic development.

Have I lost you yet? Hang in there! If that isn't cool enough...

The Himalayan mutation also provides these cats with their famous intense blue eyes. Yay, more science!

There are two layers inside the iris of mammalian eyes that determine what color the eyes are: the stroma and the epithelium.

In most cats, pigmented cells that produce melanin are scattered throughout these layers, although mostly in the epithelium. But for cats with the Himalayan mutation, there is little to no melanin production at all due to their albinism.
"But Jen! If there's no color in a Siamese's eyes, why do they appear blue?"
For the same reason Earth's sky appears blue.

Of all the colors in the visible light spectrum, blue has the shortest wavelength. Colors with shorter wavelengths scatter easier than colors with longer wavelengths - which is a phenomenon called Rayleigh Scattering.

When sunlight streams through the sky, it is a mixture of many different colors of light. As we all know, all colors of the spectrum combine to form white light, and it can also be reversely broken down from white light into various color wavelengths.

Light such as red and orange travels in long, stretched-out, easy moving waves. It has no trouble passing between the millions of tiny particles that make up the sky. It slides between and around them in much the same way that a piece of thread easily glides through the eye of a needle without ever touching the sides. During most times of day, red and orange and yellow light waves, even green light waves, easily flow and move around the molecules and escape. You never see them. They are gone from the sky before you can even blink, and that is why you don't see them.

However, unlike the other colors, blue light travels in short, tightly coiled waves. It's somewhat like a frayed, frizzy thread refusing to go through that needle eye without repeatedly bumping into the sides and bunching up. If you've ever tried to thread a needle with a split end, you totally get this.

So Instead of sliding right past, blue light tends to hit all the tiny microscopic particles in the sky, bouncing around and eventually bouncing toward your eyes. Consequently, when you look at the sky during the day, usually you see all blue.

That said, we all know the color of the sky can change based on weather, time of day, etc. This all boils down to the concentration of particles in the sky. Add some smog or a bit of water vapor, and the sky becomes a more pale form of blue. Add more water vapor or urban pollution, and the sky soon appears almost white. During sunrise or sunset, the angle of the sun changes in relation to your position, and its light suddenly has to go through a MUCH thicker layer of atmosphere than it does at Noon - therefore there are an infinite number of additional particles present.

The crowding of these additional particles in the atmosphere then tightens the spaces through which light waves can pass. The red, orange, yellow, and green waves that normally glide around the particles have less room, and are now bouncing off these extra particles as only the blue waves usually do. Therefore not only threads of blue light are visible, but various other light wavelengths as well. When all wavelengths bounce equally, it becomes almost white. [ 10]
Phew! Now back to cats.
The same applies to the irises of cats with the Himalayan mutation. Because there is little to no melanin to otherwise interfere or reflect, white light bounces off the microscopic molecules in the melanin-lacking iris - and only the blue wavelength scatters around, eventually reaching our eyes to be seen.

Now, technically speaking, the shortest wavelength is actually the violet one. Blue is second shortest. So why don't the sky and Siamese cat eyes appear violet to us? Simply because our human eyes just don't see that color wavelength very well. Human physiology has no biological need to see this wavelength of color for survival, reproduction, etc. so we just don't pick it up unless it is very intense and strong (like a flower or paint). So for us, blue wins. A bird or a bee looking at the sky or your cat's eyes would very likely see a shade closer to violet, because they are designed to see that spectrum for biological reasons.
So why are there so many shades of blue among pointed cats?
This goes back to where I described how cats with this mutation have normal coat colors, just with partial temperature-dependent albinism applied. i.e. a Seal Point is a black cat with partial albinism, a Blue Point is a gray cat with partial albinism, etc.
Stay with me here!
Just like with their coat color, cats with the Himalayan mutation also carry the same genes for eye color as "normal" cats - again, overlaid by the albinism. Therefore a black cat with copper eyes becomes a Seal Point with the same copper eye gene. But since the eyes are a warm area of the body, the iris does not generate melanin as the enzyme is deactivated just like on warm areas of the body. Yet there are still microscopic amounts of pigment cells sitting there. Copper eyes have more pigment-making cells (melanocytes) than green eyes, yellow eyes, etc. - and although inactivated, the cells still exist.

These cells act like the "pollution" does in the sky I mentioned above, or the thicker atmosphere. They create a higher density of microscopic particles for light to bounce off of.

Therefore cats with the Himalayan mutation who have inactivated copper eyes will scatter more wavelengths than just blue. Their eyes will look very pale, whitish blue as all the wavelengths combine. Cats with inactivated green eyes will have very deep, dark sapphire blue eyes. Since non-albino cats have a wide variety of shades of copper, orange, gold, yellow, and green, it makes sense that the Himalayan mutation creates the same variety based on the number of cells present, but based on the blue wavelength spectrum!

This is also why most mammals are born with dark blue eyes. Their melanocytes have not yet formed, and this is why they change later on once the cells develop and begin working. This is why pointed cats are born with the same dark blue eyes then get lighter or brighter blue eyes as they grow. They also lack ocular melanocytes at birth as their non-albino cousins do, but as they develop them, the cells do not produce melanin as their cousins' cells would. Then the light wavelengths begin hitting the inactive cells and so on and so forth. Voila! Lighter blue irises.

So what does all of this fancy-schmancy stuff mean?

What it boils down to is this:

The parents of any kitten/cat with colored points and blue eyes could just be run of the mill DSH or DLH cats; black or tabby or orange or grey or what have you, that happened to have an ancestor with the Himalayan mutation 50 years ago or 100 years ago OR had a random common mutation occur in their genetic code that happened to match with the same mutation in the mate they reproduced with.

As I mentioned above, this is why you can have a random pointed Himalayan mutation pop up in an otherwise normal DSH litter (what many people call a "Siamese" baby within an otherwise domestic litter). It doesn't necessarily mean they had Siamese or any other purebred breed in their lineage, it just means the two parents carried the same genetic mutation and that individual kitten happened to inherit 2 copies in order to express the phenotype (remember the dice roll?). Underneath it all, that kitten is actually a black or gray or orange DSH with a form of albinism changing his/her coat color distribution.

It also means that the color you see in your cat's eyes is completely unique to him/her, due to the individual number of microscopic cells in his/her irises creating specific scattered light wavelengths that combine to create his/her exact shade of blue. No other cat will have that same specific combination. ♥️
Phew!
So unless a cat has breed-specific traits/conformation, came from a specific breeder of that breed, and you know precisely what his or her pedigree is - their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents, etc. - proving purebred lineage, then they are not a Siamese, or a Tonkinese, or a Himalayan, or a Ragdoll...and are simply a beautiful DSH/DLH displaying the Homozygous form of a recessive gene at the C locus...a gorgeous mutt with an inherited coloration mutation. 😊

Here's a fantastic peer-reviewed research article about the Himalayan mutation in mice if you're into science and genetic chemistry:
Molecular basis of mouse Himalayan mutation.
[Featured Image: A photo of one of my Mom's purebred Applehead Siamese kittens that I took several years ago. His eyes were mid-change from neonate deep blue to adult turquoise.]

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Siamese Genetics: Why That Cute Pointed Kitten May Not Be One After All!

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The actual pointed coat coloring that Siamese and other breeds are known for (as well as rats, mice, and rabbits) is simply a recessive form of partial albinism called "Himalayan". The Himalayan mutation alters the enzyme responsible for melanin production, which is called Tyrosinase. The mutation restricts the ability of tyrosinase to oxidize tyrosine only...

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One health |        PEER Program (Youth STEM Promotion)

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This is a free, new, standards-based mobile-app curriculum that has been designed to be more interesting and motivating to students by framing academic

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Insect decline in the Anthropocene: Death by a thousand cuts

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Nature is under siege. In the last 10,000 y the human population has grown from 1 million to 7.8 billion. Much of Earth's arable lands are already in agriculture (1), millions of acres of tropical forest are cleared each year (2, 3), atmospheric CO2 levels are at their highest concentrations in more than 3 million y (4), and climates are erratically and steadily changing from pole to pole, triggering unprecedented droughts, fires, and floods across continents.

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Some of the most popular products of biotechnology - corn and cotton plants that have been genetically modified to fend off insects - are no longer offering the same protection from those bugs. Scientists say that the problem results from farmers overusing the crops, and are pushing for new regulations.

These crops were the original genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. They weren't the first ones invented, but they were the first to be widely embraced by farmers, starting in the late 1990s.

They got their bug-resistant features from a kind of bacteria that lives in the soil, called Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, which is poisonous to the larval stage of some major insect pests, including the corn rootworm and cotton bollworm. Scientists inserted some of these bacterial genes into corn and cotton, and the plants themselves produced these insect-killing proteins.

Bt crops brought a two-fold benefit: Cotton and corn farmers didn't need to use so many chemicals to control the bollworm and related pests after they were released, starting in 1996. "Our insecticide sprays just plummeted, and there were guys who wouldn't have to treat at all," says David Kerns, an entomologist at Texas A&M University, speaking of cotton farmers.

This was also good news for the environment. The Bt proteins are toxic to a relatively small number of insects, and they're practically harmless to people and other animals. Unlike the insecticides that they replaced, they were not killing significant numbers of pollinators like bees and butterflies, or beneficial insects that prey on pests and help to keep them under control.

Farmers like Jonathan Evans in North Carolina liked Bt cotton because it made farming easier. "It's always better for the plant to protect itself, than for us to have to go out and spray for the worm," he says. "You can tend a lot more acres, with a lot less equipment."

Now all of those benefits are increasingly at risk. Bt crops are losing their power. New strains of bollworms, rootworms, and other pests have emerged that are able to feed on Bt plants without dying. David Kerns says some farmers are pretty angry about it. "There are words I can't use," he says, "but they want to know what the heck they're doing, paying for a technology and then they're still having to spray."

The current situation is complicated by the fact that biotech companies have deployed close to a dozen slightly different Bt genes, targeting a variety of insects. In many cases, the bugshave evolved resistance to some Bt proteins, but not others, and the prevalence of Bt-resistant insects varies from place to place. "The impact can be patchy, but when it's there, it's big," says Julie Peterson, an entomologist at the University of Nebraska. "If you're the farmer who ends up with all of their corn laying down on the ground because the roots have been completely fed on by rootworm beetles, that's a huge impact to you."

Scientists have long warned about this risk. They've been engaged in a long-running argument with the companies selling Bt crops, such as Monsanto, which has been acquired by Bayer.

Even before Monsanto started selling the first Bt crops, independent scientists pushed the Environmental Protection Agency to limit the amount of land that farmers could devote to Bt crops. If these crops were planted everywhere, the scientists argued, it would create a situation in which, if a few rare insects happened to be genetically capable of surviving Bt proteins, they would be the sole survivors, quickly mate with each other, and produce a new strain of resistant insects. Biologists call this "selection pressure."

The solution, they said, was a requirement that farmers devote some of their land to non-Bt crops. This would allow plenty of non-resistant insects to survive, and make it less likely that the rare resistant insects would mate with each other.

The EPA adopted this strategy, but independent scientists and biotech companies have disagreed over the years about how big these refuges need to be. In the case of some Bt crops, such as corn hybrids with genes targeting the corn rootworm, scientists have urged the EPA to require that farmers to devote at least half of their fields to non-Bt corn. The companies balked at that, since it would have limited sales of their products. They convinced the EPA that such large refuges weren't necessary.

The warnings, however, turned out to be well-founded. Over the past decade, insects like the corn rootworm, the cotton bollworm, and the Western bean cutworm have become resistant to one Bt gene after the other.

Now scientists, once again, are pushing for tighter government rules. "We are at an important point, where we've seen what can happen, and definitely do need to make some changes," Julie Peterson says.

The biggest proposed changes are intended to preserve one particular Bt gene, called called Vip3A,which has been incorporated into both corn and cotton plants.

Vip3A came on the market a little later, and it is slightly different from other Bt genes, "so it still is effective against a lot of insects, and it's sort of carrying a lot of the weight right now," Peterson says. The company Syngenta sells it under the trade name Agrisure Viptera.

Scientists are worried that it will soon break under the weight of overuse, especially in cotton-growing areas of the South. There, the Vip3A gene is currently deployed in both corn and cotton to fight off an insect known both as the cotton bollworm and the corn earworm. Kerns says that he and his colleagues have found a recessive genetic trait for Vip3A resistance in this insect population. If Vip3A is widely used, insects carrying this resistance trait will be more likely to survive, mate, and produce fully resistant offspring.

Two years ago, a group of the EPA's outside scientific advisors recommended unanimously that the agency prohibit the use of Vip3A in corn in the South. This would preserve its effectiveness in cotton, they said, where it's much more valuable.

The company that owns the Vip3A gene - Syngenta - argued that such a prohibition wasn't necessary or fair. In its latest draft document on the issue, the EPA backed away from the idea. Instead, the agency proposed a variety of other measures. They include a requirement that companies plant and monitor"sentinel plots" of Bt crops that could provide early warning of insect resistance, and also that companies force farmers to abide by existing requirements to plant non-Bt refuges. Studies have found many farmers ignoring these rules.

Peterson says that if current farming practices don't change, it's possible that all of the Bt genes currently on the market will stop working reliably within a decade.

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As Biotech Crops Lose Their Power, Scientists Push For New Restrictions

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subscribe to Short Wave podcast Some of the most popular products of biotechnology - corn and cotton plants that have been genetically modified to fend off insects - are no longer offering the same protection from those bugs. Scientists say that the problem results from farmers overusing the crops, and are pushing for new regulations.

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The low-lying shrubs, grasses and other plants growing in the Arctic are getting taller.

The finding comes from scientists who have analysed three decades of measurements.

This data, gathered across Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia and Russia, indicates that a warming climate is driving the change.

The team of 180 researchers says the increase in height could ultimately work to push up temperatures further.

The international group reports its work in the journal Nature.

Co-lead author Isla Myers-Smith, from the University of Edinburgh, UK, predicted that, on their current trajectory, the centimetres-tall Arctic flora could double in size by the end of the century.

"That doesn't seem like a very dramatic increase, but if you compare it to the ecosystems around your house like the forest nearby - if you imagined that forest getting twice as tall; that is a pretty dramatic change," she told BBC News.

Plants have to be hardy to flourish in the far north or high up Alpine mountains.

The cold and short growing season precludes trees. Instead, this tundra landscape is populated by small species that hug the ground. But the Arctic is undergoing rapid change.

Recent decades have seen the region experience some of the fastest rates of warming on the planet. It is not simply that existing plants have increased their stature, although that is the case; it is more that taller species are now invading areas they never used to grow in large numbers.

As an example, vernal sweetgrass, which is common in lowland Europe, has now moved into the research plots in Iceland and Sweden where long-term monitoring is undertaken.

Why does height matter?

The re-profiling of plant communities is important because it could alter the way the tundra ecosystem functions.

Taller Arctic plants will trap more snow around them, insulating the ground from very cold air and preventing it from freezing quite so hard. This makes it easier for usually rock-solid soils to thaw out in summer months and release their carbon into the atmosphere. This would add to the warming.

Taller plants could also effect the same outcome because, by sticking their heads above the snow, they would present a darker surface, and that allows the ecosystem to trap more heat from the Sun.

"Although there are still many uncertainties, taller tundra plants could fuel climate change, both in the Arctic and for the planet as a whole," said the study's other co-lead investigator, Anne Bjorkman, from the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, Germany.

How does this study stand out?

It is remarkable because of its scale. It incorporates more than 60,000 data observations from hundreds of sites across the Arctic and in the European Alps and the American Rockies.

The information reaches back through the decades, enabling it to reliably catch real trends.

Scientists will revisit specific locations to take the same measurements over and over again. These measurements cover everything from plant height and leaf area to wood density, seed size, leaf chemistry, and more.

Those researchers who initiated the earliest data collections could never have known precisely how their persistence would eventually pay off. They would just have had the recognition that long observation series are invaluable.

"One of the goals of our project was to make this database publicly available so that future researchers can ask questions that we can't anticipate right now either," said Dr Myers-Smith.

UK funding for this project came from the Natural Environment Research Council. You can read more at the Team Shrub and Arctic Above websites.

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The low-lying shrubs, grasses and other plants growing in the Arctic are getting taller. The finding comes from scientists who have analysed three decades of measurements. This data, gathered across Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia and Russia, indicates that a warming climate is driving the change.

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Insect Collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’ The Guardian, Damian Carrington, Environmental Editor, Tuesday, 15 Jan 2019

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Insect Collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’ The Guardian, Damian Carrington, Environmental Editor, Tuesday, 15 Jan 2019

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Insect collapse: 'We are destroying our life support systems'

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Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished

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Kate Raworth: How Can We Create a Thriving Economy for Ourselves and the Planet? Video of TED Talk 7 December 2018 – also see TED Radio Hour “Circular”

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Kate Raworth: How Can We Create a Thriving Economy for Ourselves and the Planet? Video of TED Talk 7 December 2018 – also see TED Radio Hour “Circular”

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subscribe to TED Radio Hour podcast

Part 1 of the TED Radio Hour episode Circular.
About Kate Raworth's TED Talk
We're often told that economic growth is good, but Kate Raworth says our addiction to growth is destroying the planet. To thrive in the 21st century, she says we need a new circular economic system.
About Kate Raworth
Kate Raworth is a self-described "renegade" economist focused on designing a sustainable economy for the future. She's the author of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist.

She has presented her ideas all over the world, including at the UN General Assembly, and has contributed to a number of publications including The Guardian, The New Statesman, Newsweek.com, and Wired.com.

She is a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and a Senior Visiting Research Associate and lecturer at Oxford's Environmental Change Institute. Raworth received her Bachelors and Masters degrees from Oxford University.

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Kate Raworth: How Can We Create A Thriving Economy For Ourselves And The Planet?

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subscribe to TED Radio Hour podcast Part 1 of the TED Radio Hour episode Circular. About Kate Raworth's TED Talk We're often told that economic growth is good, but Kate Raworth says our addiction to growth is destroying the planet. To thrive in the 21st century, she says we need a new circular economic system.

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The Insect Apocalypse is Here. What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth? The New Your Time Magazine Feature

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The Insect Apocalypse is Here. What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth? The New Your Time Magazine Feature

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Credit... Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images.

Feature

What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?

Credit... Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images.

S une Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen, when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss. Specifically, something was missing.

It was summer. He was out in the country, moving fast. But strangely, he wasn't eating any bugs.

For a moment, Riis was transported to his childhood on the Danish island of Lolland, in the Baltic Sea. Back then, summer bike rides meant closing his mouth to cruise through thick clouds of insects, but inevitably he swallowed some anyway. When his parents took him driving, he remembered, the car's windshield was frequently so smeared with insect carcasses that you almost couldn't see through it. But all that seemed distant now. He couldn't recall the last time he needed to wash bugs from his windshield; he even wondered, vaguely, whether car manufacturers had invented some fancy new coating to keep off insects. But this absence, he now realized with some alarm, seemed to be all around him. Where had all those insects gone? And when? And why hadn't he noticed?

Riis watched his son, flying through the beautiful day, not eating bugs, and was struck by the melancholy thought that his son's childhood would lack this particular bug-eating experience of his own. It was, he granted, an odd thing to feel nostalgic about. But he couldn't shake a feeling of loss. "I guess it's pretty human to think that everything was better when you were a kid," he said. "Maybe I didn't like it when I was on my bike and I ate all the bugs, but looking back on it, I think it's something everybody should experience."

I met Riis, a lanky high school science and math teacher, on a hot day in June. He was anxious about not having yet written his address for the school's graduation ceremony that evening, but first, he had a job to do. From his garage, he retrieved a large insect net, drove to a nearby intersection and stopped to strap the net to the car's roof. Made of white mesh, the net ran the length of his car and was held up by a tent pole at the front, tapering to a small, removable bag in back. Drivers whizzing past twisted their heads to stare. Riis eyed his parking spot nervously as he adjusted the straps of the contraption. "This is not 100 percent legal," he said, "but I guess, for the sake of science."

Riis had not been able to stop thinking about the missing bugs. The more he learned, the more his nostalgia gave way to worry. Insects are the vital pollinators and recyclers of ecosystems and the base of food webs everywhere. Riis was not alone in noticing their decline. In the United States, scientists recently found the population of monarch butterflies fell by 90 percent in the last 20 years, a loss of 900 million individuals; the rusty-patched bumblebee, which once lived in 28 states, dropped by 87 percent over the same period. With other, less-studied insect species, one butterfly researcher told me, "all we can do is wave our arms and say, 'It's not here anymore!' " Still, the most disquieting thing wasn't the disappearance of certain species of insects; it was the deeper worry, shared by Riis and many others, that a whole insect world might be quietly going missing, a loss of abundance that could alter the planet in unknowable ways. "We notice the losses," says David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut. "It's the diminishment that we don't see."

Because insects are legion, inconspicuous and hard to meaningfully track, the fear that there might be far fewer than before was more felt than documented. People noticed it by canals or in backyards or under streetlights at night - familiar places that had become unfamiliarly empty. The feeling was so common that entomologists developed a shorthand for it, named for the way many people first began to notice that they weren't seeing as many bugs. They called it the windshield phenomenon.

To test what had been primarily a loose suspicion of wrongness, Riis and 200 other Danes were spending the month of June roaming their country's back roads in their outfitted cars. They were part of a study conducted by the Natural History Museum of Denmark, a joint effort of the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University and North Carolina State University. The nets would stand in for windshields as Riis and the other volunteers drove through various habitats - urban areas, forests, agricultural tracts, uncultivated open land and wetlands - hoping to quantify the disorienting sense that, as one of the study's designers put it, "something from the past is missing from the present."

When the investigators began planning the study in 2016, they weren't sure if anyone would sign up. But by the time the nets were ready, a paper by an obscure German entomological society had brought the problem of insect decline into sharp focus. The German study found that, measured simply by weight, the overall abundance of flying insects in German nature reserves had decreased by 75 percent over just 27 years. If you looked at midsummer population peaks, the drop was 82 percent.

Riis learned about the study from a group of his students in one of their class projects. They must have made some kind of mistake in their citation, he thought. But they hadn't. The study would quickly become, according to the website Altmetric, the sixth-most-discussed scientific paper of 2017. Headlines around the world warned of an "insect Armageddon."

Within days of announcing the insect-collection project, the Natural History Museum of Denmark was turning away eager volunteers by the dozens. It seemed there were people like Riis everywhere, people who had noticed a change but didn't know what to make of it. How could something as fundamental as the bugs in the sky just disappear? And what would become of the world without them?

Anyone who has returned to a childhood haunt to find that everything somehow got smaller knows that humans are not great at remembering the past accurately. This is especially true when it comes to changes to the natural world. It is impossible to maintain a fixed perspective, as Heraclitus observed 2,500 years ago: It is not the same river, but we are also not the same people.

A 1995 study, by Peter H. Kahn and Batya Friedman, of the way some children in Houston experienced pollution summed up our blindness this way: "With each generation, the amount of environmental degradation increases, but each generation takes that amount as the norm." In decades of photos of fishermen holding up their catch in the Florida Keys, the marine biologist Loren McClenachan found a perfect illustration of this phenomenon, which is often called "shifting baseline syndrome." The fish got smaller and smaller, to the point where the prize catches were dwarfed by fish that in years past were piled up and ignored. But the smiles on the fishermen's faces stayed the same size. The world never feels fallen, because we grow accustomed to the fall.

By one measure, bugs are the wildlife we know best, the nondomesticated animals whose lives intersect most intimately with our own: spiders in the shower, ants at the picnic, ticks buried in the skin. We sometimes feel that we know them rather too well. In another sense, though, they are one of our planet's greatest mysteries, a reminder of how little we know about what's happening in the world around us.

We've named and described a million species of insects, a stupefying array of thrips and firebrats and antlions and caddis flies and froghoppers and other enormous families of bugs that most of us can't even name. (Technically, the word "bug" applies only to the order Hemiptera, also known as true bugs, species that have tubelike mouths for piercing and sucking - and there are as many as 80,000 named varieties of those.) The ones we think we do know well, we don't: There are 12,000 types of ants, nearly 20,000 varieties of bees, almost 400,000 species of beetles, so many that the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane reportedly quipped that God must have an inordinate fondness for them. A bit of healthy soil a foot square and two inches deep might easily be home to 200 unique species of mites, each, presumably, with a subtly different job to do. And yet entomologists estimate that all this amazing, absurd and understudied variety represents perhaps only 20 percent of the actual diversity of insects on our planet - that there are millions and millions of species that are entirely unknown to science.

With so much abundance, it very likely never occurred to most entomologists of the past that their multitudinous subjects might dwindle away. As they poured themselves into studies of the life cycles and taxonomies of the species that fascinated them, few thought to measure or record something as boring as their number. Besides, tracking quantity is slow, tedious and unglamorous work: setting and checking traps, waiting years or decades for your data to be meaningful, grappling with blunt baseline questions instead of more sophisticated ones. And who would pay for it? Most academic funding is short-term, but when what you're interested in is invisible, generational change, says Dave Goulson, an entomologist at the University of Sussex, "a three-year monitoring program is no good to anybody." This is especially true of insect populations, which are naturally variable, with wide, trend-obscuring fluctuations from one year to the next.

When entomologists began noticing and investigating insect declines, they lamented the absence of solid information from the past in which to ground their experiences of the present. "We see a hundred of something, and we think we're fine," Wagner says, "but what if there were 100,000 two generations ago?" Rob Dunn, an ecologist at North Carolina State University who helped design the net experiment in Denmark, recently searched for studies showing the effect of pesticide spraying on the quantity of insects living in nearby forests. He was surprised to find that no such studies existed. "We ignored really basic questions," he said. "It feels like we've dropped the ball in some giant collective way."

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If entomologists lacked data, what they did have were some very worrying clues. Along with the impression that they were seeing fewer bugs in their own jars and nets while out doing experiments - a windshield phenomenon specific to the sorts of people who have bug jars and nets - there were documented downward slides of well-studied bugs, including various kinds of bees, moths, butterflies and beetles. In Britain, as many as 30 to 60 percent of species were found to have diminishing ranges. Larger trends were harder to pin down, though a 2014 review in Science tried to quantify these declines by synthesizing the findings of existing studies and found that a majority of monitored species were declining, on average by 45 percent.

Entomologists also knew that climate change and the overall degradation of global habitat are bad news for biodiversity in general, and that insects are dealing with the particular challenges posed by herbicides and pesticides, along with the effects of losing meadows, forests and even weedy patches to the relentless expansion of human spaces. There were studies of other, better-understood species that suggested that the insects associated with them might be declining, too. People who studied fish found that the fish had fewer mayflies to eat. Ornithologists kept finding that birds that rely on insects for food were in trouble: eight in 10 partridges gone from French farmlands; 50 and 80 percent drops, respectively, for nightingales and turtledoves. Half of all farmland birds in Europe disappeared in just three decades. At first, many scientists assumed the familiar culprit of habitat destruction was at work, but then they began to wonder if the birds might simply be starving. In Denmark, an ornithologist named Anders Tottrup was the one who came up with the idea of turning cars into insect trackers for the windshield-effect study after he noticed that rollers, little owls, Eurasian hobbies and bee-eaters - all birds that subsist on large insects such as beetles and dragonflies - had abruptly disappeared from the landscape.

The signs were certainly alarming, but they were also just signs, not enough to justify grand pronouncements about the health of insects as a whole or about what might be driving a widespread, cross-species decline. "There are no quantitative data on insects, so this is just a hypothesis," Hans de Kroon, an ecologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, explained to me - not the sort of language that sends people to the barricades.

Then came the German study. Scientists are still cautious about what the findings might imply about other regions of the world. But the study brought forth exactly the kind of longitudinal data they had been seeking, and it wasn't specific to just one type of insect. The numbers were stark, indicating a vast impoverishment of an entire insect universe, even in protected areas where insects ought to be under less stress. The speed and scale of the drop were shocking even to entomologists who were already anxious about bees or fireflies or the cleanliness of car windshields.

The results were surprising in another way too. The long-term details about insect abundance, the kind that no one really thought existed, hadn't appeared in a particularly prestigious journal and didn't come from university-affiliated scientists, but from a small society of insect enthusiasts based in the modest German city Krefeld.

Krefeld sits a half-hour drive outside Düsseldorf, near the western bank of the Rhine. It's a city of brick houses and bright flower gardens and a stadtwald - a municipal forest and park - where paddle boats float on a lake, umbrellas shade a beer garden and (I couldn't help noticing) the afternoon light through the trees illuminates small swarms of dancing insects.

Near the center of the old city, a paper sign, not much larger than a business card, identifies the stolid headquarters of the society whose research caused so much commotion. When it was founded, in 1905, the society operated out of another building, one that was destroyed when Britain bombed the city during World War II. (By the time the bombs fell, members had moved their precious records and collections of insects, some of which dated back to the 1860s, to an underground bunker.) Nowadays, the society uses more than 6,000 square feet of an old three-story school as storage space. Ask for a tour of the collections, and you will hear such sentences as "This whole room is Lepidoptera," referring to a former classroom stuffed with what I at first took to be shelves of books but which are in fact innumerable wooden frames containing pinned butterflies and moths; and, in an even larger room, "every bumblebee here was collected before the Second World War, 1880 to 1930"; and, upon opening a drawer full of sweat bees, "It's a new collection, 30 years only."

On the shelves that do hold books, I counted 31 clearly well-loved volumes in the series "Beetles of Middle Europe." A 395-page book that cataloged specimens of spider wasps - where they were collected; where they were stored - of the western Palearctic said "1948-2008" on the cover. I asked my guide, a society member named Martin Sorg, who was one of the lead authors of the paper, whether those dates reflected when the specimens were collected. "No," Sorg replied, "that was the time the author needed for this work."

Sorg, who rolls his own cigarettes and wears John Lennon glasses and whose gray hair grows long past his shoulders, is not a freewheeling type when it comes to his insect work. And his insect work is really all he wants to talk about. "We think details about nature and biodiversity declines are important, not details about life histories of entomologists," Sorg explained after he and Werner Stenmans, a society member whose name appeared alongside Sorg's on the 2017 paper, dismissed my questions about their day jobs. Leery of an article that focused on him as a person, Sorg also didn't want to talk about what drew him to entomology as a child or even what it was about certain types of wasps that had made him want to devote so much of his life to studying them. "We normally give life histories when someone is dead," he said.

There was a reason for the wariness. Society members dislike seeing themselves described, over and over in news stories, as "amateurs." It's a framing that reflects, they believe, a too-narrow understanding of what it means to be an expert or even a scientist - what it means to be a student of the natural world.

Amateurs have long provided much of the patchy knowledge we have about nature. Those bee and butterfly studies? Most depend on mass mobilizations of volunteers willing to walk transects and count insects, every two weeks or every year, year after year. The scary numbers about bird declines were gathered this way, too, though because birds can be hard to spot, volunteers often must learn to identify them by their sounds. Britain, which has a particularly strong tradition of amateur naturalism, has the best-studied bugs in the world. As technologically advanced as we are, the natural world is still a very big and complex place, and the best way to learn what's going on is for a lot of people to spend a lot of time observing it. The Latin root of the word "amateur" is, after all, the word "lover."

Some of these citizen-scientists are true beginners clutching field guides; others, driven by their own passion and following in a long tradition of "amateur" naturalism, are far from novices. Think of Victorians with their butterfly nets and curiosity cabinets; of Vladimir Nabokov, whose theories about the evolution of Polyommatus blue butterflies were ignored until proved correct by DNA testing more than 30 years after his death; of young Charles Darwin, cutting his classes at Cambridge to collect beetles at Wicken Fen and once putting a live beetle in his mouth because his hands were already full of other bugs.

The Krefeld society is volunteer-run, and many members have other jobs in unrelated fields, but they also have an enormous depth of knowledge about insects, accumulated through years of what other people might consider obsessive attention. Some study the ecology or evolutionary taxonomy of their favorite species or map their populations or breed them to study their life histories. All hone their identification skills across species by amassing their own collections of carefully pinned and labeled insects like those that fill the society's storage rooms. Sorg estimated that of the society's 63 members, a third are university-trained in subjects such as biology or earth science. Another third, he said, are "highly specialized and highly qualified but they never visited the university," while the remaining third are actual amateurs who are still in the process of becoming "real" entomologists: "Some of them may also have a degree from the university, but in our view, they are beginners."

The society members' projects often involved setting up what are called malaise traps, nets that look like tents and drive insects flying by into bottles of ethanol. Because of the scientific standards of the society, members followed certain procedures: They always employed identical traps, sewn from a template they first used in 1982. (Sorg showed me the original rolled-up craft paper with great solemnity.) They always put them in the same places. (Before GPS, that meant a painstaking process of triangulating with surveying equipment. "We are not sure about a few centimeters," Sorg granted.) They saved everything they caught, regardless of what the main purpose of the experiment was. (The society bought so much ethanol that it attracted the attention of a narcotics unit.)

Those bottles of insects were gathered into thousands of boxes, which are now crammed into what were once offices in the upper reaches of the school. When the society members, like entomologists elsewhere, began to notice that they were seeing fewer insects, they had something against which to measure their worries.

"We don't throw away anything, we store everything," Sorg explained. "That gives us today the possibility to go back in time."

In 2013, Krefeld entomologists confirmed that the total number of insects caught in one nature reserve was nearly 80 percent lower than the same spot in 1989. They had sampled other sites, analyzed old data sets and found similar declines: Where 30 years earlier, they often needed a liter bottle for a week of trapping, now a half-liter bottle usually sufficed. But it would have taken even highly trained entomologists years of painstaking work to identify all the insects in the bottles. So the society used a standardized method for weighing insects in alcohol, which told a powerful story simply by showing how much the overall mass of insects dropped over time. "A decline of this mixture," Sorg said, "is a very different thing than the decline of only a few species."

The society collaborated with de Kroon and other scientists at Radboud University in the Netherlands, who did a trend analysis of the data that Krefeld provided, controlling for things like the effects of nearby plants, weather and forest cover on fluctuations in insect populations. The final study looked at 63 nature preserves, representing almost 17,000 sampling days, and found consistent declines in every kind of habitat they sampled. This suggested, the authors wrote, "that it is not only the vulnerable species but the flying-insect community as a whole that has been decimated over the last few decades."

For some scientists, the study created a moment of reckoning. "Scientists thought this data was too boring," Dunn says. "But these people found it beautiful, and they loved it. They were the ones paying attention to Earth for all the rest of us."

The current worldwide loss of biodiversity is popularly known as the sixth extinction: the sixth time in world history that a large number of species have disappeared in unusually rapid succession, caused this time not by asteroids or ice ages but by humans. When we think about losing biodiversity, we tend to think of the last northern white rhinos protected by armed guards, of polar bears on dwindling ice floes. Extinction is a visceral tragedy, universally understood: There is no coming back from it. The guilt of letting a unique species vanish is eternal.

But extinction is not the only tragedy through which we're living. What about the species that still exist, but as a shadow of what they once were? In "The Once and Future World," the journalist J.B. MacKinnon cites records from recent centuries that hint at what has only just been lost: "In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in midocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship's captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see. ... Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes." There were reports of lions in the south of France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that took three days to fly overhead, as many as 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for every one that's there now. "These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice," MacKinnon writes. "We are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory."

What we're losing is not just the diversity part of biodiversity, but the bio part: life in sheer quantity. While I was writing this article, scientists learned that the world's largest king penguin colony shrank by 88 percent in 35 years, that more than 97 percent of the bluefin tuna that once lived in the ocean are gone. The number of Sophie the Giraffe toys sold in France in a single year is nine times the number of all the giraffes that still live in Africa.

Finding reassurance in the survival of a few symbolic standard-bearers ignores the value of abundance, of a natural world that thrives on richness and complexity and interaction. Tigers still exist, for example, but that doesn't change the fact that 93 percent of the land where they used to live is now tigerless. This matters for more than romantic reasons: Large animals, especially top predators like tigers, connect ecosystems to one another and move energy and resources among them simply by walking and eating and defecating and dying. (In the deep ocean, sunken whale carcasses form the basis of entire ecosystems in nutrient-poor places.) One result of their loss is what's known as trophic cascade, the unraveling of an ecosystem's fabric as prey populations boom and crash and the various levels of the food web no longer keep each other in check. These places are emptier, impoverished in a thousand subtle ways.

Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar kind, numerical extinction). Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. Some phrase this as the extinction not of a species but of all its former interactions with its environment - an extinction of seed dispersal and predation and pollination and all the other ecological functions an animal once had, which can be devastating even if some individuals still persist. The more interactions are lost, the more disordered the ecosystem becomes. A 2013 paper in Nature, which modeled both natural and computer-generated food webs, suggested that a loss of even 30 percent of a species' abundance can be so destabilizing that other species start going fully, numerically extinct - in fact, 80 percent of the time it was a secondarily affected creature that was the first to disappear. A famous real-world example of this type of cascade concerns sea otters. When they were nearly wiped out in the northern Pacific, their prey, sea urchins, ballooned in number and decimated kelp forests, turning a rich environment into a barren one and also possibly contributing to numerical extinctions, notably of the Steller's sea cow.

Conservationists tend to focus on rare and endangered species, but it is common ones, because of their abundance, that power the living systems of our planet. Most species are not common, but within many animal groups most individuals - some 80 percent of them - belong to common species. Like the slow approach of twilight, their declines can be hard to see. White-rumped vultures were nearly gone from India before there was widespread awareness of their disappearance. Describing this phenomenon in the journal BioScience, Kevin Gaston, a professor of biodiversity and conservation at the University of Exeter, wrote: "Humans seem innately better able to detect the complete loss of an environmental feature than its progressive change."

In addition to extinction (the complete loss of a species) and extirpation (a localized extinction), scientists now speak of defaunation: the loss of individuals, the loss of abundance, the loss of a place's absolute animalness. In a 2014 article in Science, researchers argued that the word should become as familiar, and influential, as the concept of deforestation. In 2017 another paper reported that major population and range losses extended even to species considered to be at low risk for extinction. They predicted "negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization" and the authors offered another term for the widespread loss of the world's wild fauna: "biological annihilation."

It is estimated that, since 1970, Earth's various populations of wild land animals have lost, on average, 60 percent of their members. Zeroing in on the category we most relate to, mammals, scientists believe that for every six wild creatures that once ate and burrowed and raised young, only one remains. What we have instead is ourselves. A study published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that if you look at the world's mammals by weight, 96 percent of that biomass is humans and livestock; just 4 percent is wild animals.

We've begun to talk about living in the Anthropocene, a world shaped by humans. But E.O. Wilson, the naturalist and prophet of environmental degradation, has suggested another name: the Eremocine, the age of loneliness.

Wilson began his career as a taxonomic entomologist, studying ants. Insects - about as far as you can get from charismatic megafauna - are not what we're usually imagining when we talk about biodiversity. Yet they are, in Wilson's words, "the little things that run the natural world." He means it literally. Insects are a case study in the invisible importance of the common.

Scientists have tried to calculate the benefits that insects provide simply by going about their business in large numbers. Trillions of bugs flitting from flower to flower pollinate some three-quarters of our food crops, a service worth as much as $500 billion every year. (This doesn't count the 80 percent of wild flowering plants, the foundation blocks of life everywhere, that rely on insects for pollination.) If monetary calculations like that sound strange, consider the Maoxian Valley in China, where shortages of insect pollinators have led farmers to hire human workers, at a cost of up to $19 per worker per day, to replace bees. Each person covers five to 10 trees a day, pollinating apple blossoms by hand.

By eating and being eaten, insects turn plants into protein and power the growth of all the uncountable species - including freshwater fish and a majority of birds - that rely on them for food, not to mention all the creatures that eat those creatures. We worry about saving the grizzly bear, says the insect ecologist Scott Hoffman Black, but where is the grizzly without the bee that pollinates the berries it eats or the flies that sustain baby salmon? Where, for that matter, are we?

Bugs are vital to the decomposition that keeps nutrients cycling, soil healthy, plants growing and ecosystems running. This role is mostly invisible, until suddenly it's not. After introducing cattle to Australia at the turn of the 19th century, settlers soon found themselves overwhelmed by the problem of their feces: For some reason, cow pies there were taking months or even years to decompose. Cows refused to eat near the stink, requiring more and more land for grazing, and so many flies bred in the piles that the country became famous for the funny hats that stockmen wore to keep them at bay. It wasn't until 1951 that a visiting entomologist realized what was wrong: The local insects, evolved to eat the more fibrous waste of marsupials, couldn't handle cow excrement. For the next 25 years, the importation, quarantine and release of dozens of species of dung beetles became a national priority. And that was just one unfilled niche. (In the United States, dung beetles save ranchers an estimated $380 million a year.) We simply don't know everything that insects do. Only about 2 percent of invertebrate species have been studied enough for us to estimate whether they are in danger of extinction, never mind what dangers that extinction might pose.

When asked to imagine what would happen if insects were to disappear completely, scientists find words like chaos, collapse, Armageddon. Wagner, the University of Connecticut entomologist, describes a flowerless world with silent forests, a world of dung and old leaves and rotting carcasses accumulating in cities and roadsides, a world of "collapse or decay and erosion and loss that would spread through ecosystems" - spiraling from predators to plants. E.O. Wilson has written of an insect-free world, a place where most plants and land animals become extinct; where fungi explodes, for a while, thriving on death and rot; and where "the human species survives, able to fall back on wind-pollinated grains and marine fishing" despite mass starvation and resource wars. "Clinging to survival in a devastated world, and trapped in an ecological dark age," he adds, "the survivors would offer prayers for the return of weeds and bugs."

But the crux of the windshield phenomenon, the reason that the creeping suspicion of change is so creepy, is that insects wouldn't have to disappear altogether for us to find ourselves missing them for reasons far beyond nostalgia. In October, an entomologist sent me an email with the subject line, "Holy [expletive]!" and an attachment: a study just out from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that he labeled, "Krefeld comes to Puerto Rico." The study included data from the 1970s and from the early 2010s, when a tropical ecologist named Brad Lister returned to the rain forest where he had studied lizards - and, crucially, their prey - 40 years earlier. Lister set out sticky traps and swept nets across foliage in the same places he had in the 1970s, but this time he and his co-author, Andres Garcia, caught much, much less: 10 to 60 times less arthropod biomass than before. (It's easy to read that number as 60 percent less, but it's sixtyfold less: Where once he caught 473 milligrams of bugs, Lister was now catching just eight milligrams.) "It was, you know, devastating," Lister told me. But even scarier were the ways the losses were already moving through the ecosystem, with serious declines in the numbers of lizards, birds and frogs. The paper reported "a bottom-up trophic cascade and consequent collapse of the forest food web." Lister's inbox quickly filled with messages from other scientists, especially people who study soil invertebrates, telling him they were seeing similarly frightening declines. Even after his dire findings, Lister found the losses shocking: "I didn't even know about the earthworm crisis!"

The strange thing, Lister said, is that, as staggering as they are, all the declines he documented would still be basically invisible to the average person walking through the Luquillo rain forest. On his last visit, the forest still felt "timeless" and "phantasmagorical," with "cascading waterfalls and carpets of flowers." You would have to be an expert to notice what was missing. But he expects the losses to push the forest toward a tipping point, after which "there is a sudden and dramatic loss of the rain-forest system," and the changes will become obvious to anyone. The place he loves will become unrecognizable.

The insects in the forest that Lister studied haven't been contending with pesticides or habitat loss, the two problems to which the Krefeld paper pointed. Instead, Lister chalks up their decline to climate change, which has already increased temperatures in Luquillo by two degrees Celsius since Lister first sampled there. Previous research suggested that tropical bugs will be unusually sensitive to temperature changes; in November, scientists who subjected laboratory beetles to a heat wave reported that the increased temperatures made them significantly less fertile. Other scientists wonder if it might be climate-induced drought or possibly invasive rats or simply "death by a thousand cuts" - a confluence of many kinds of changes to the places where insects once thrived.

Like other species, insects are responding to what Chris Thomas, an insect ecologist at the University of York, has called "the transformation of the world": not just a changing climate but also the widespread conversion, via urbanization, agricultural intensification and so on, of natural spaces into human ones, with fewer and fewer resources "left over" for nonhuman creatures to live on. What resources remain are often contaminated. Hans de Kroon characterizes the life of many modern insects as trying to survive from one dwindling oasis to the next but with "a desert in between, and at worst it's a poisonous desert." Of particular concern are neonicotinoids, neurotoxins that were thought to affect only treated crops but turned out to accumulate in the landscape and to be consumed by all kinds of nontargeted bugs. People talk about the "loss" of bees to colony collapse disorder, and that appears to be the right word: Affected hives aren't full of dead bees, but simply mysteriously empty. A leading theory is that exposure to neurotoxins leaves bees unable to find their way home. Even hives exposed to low levels of neonicotinoids have been shown to collect less pollen and produce fewer eggs and far fewer queens. Some recent studies found bees doing better in cities than in the supposed countryside.

The diversity of insects means that some will manage to make do in new environments, some will thrive (abundance cuts both ways: agricultural monocultures, places where only one kind of plant grows, allow some pests to reach population levels they would never achieve in nature) and some, searching for food and shelter in a world nothing like the one they were meant for, will fail. While we need much more data to better understand the reasons or mechanisms behind the ups and downs, Thomas says, "the average across all species is still a decline."

Since the Krefeld study came out, researchers have begun searching for other forgotten repositories of information that might offer windows into the past. Some of the Radboud researchers have analyzed long-term data, belonging to Dutch entomological societies, about beetles and moths in certain reserves; they found significant drops (72 percent, 54 percent) that mirrored the Krefeld ones. Roel van Klink, a researcher at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, told me that before Krefeld, he, like most entomologists, had never been interested in biomass. Now he is looking for historical data sets - many of which began as studies of agricultural pests, like a decades-long study of grasshoppers in Kansas - that could help create a more thorough picture of what's happening to creatures that are at once abundant and imperiled. So far he has found forgotten data from 140 old data sets for 1,500 locations that could be resampled.

In the United States, one of the few long-term data sets about insect abundance comes from the work of Arthur Shapiro, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. In 1972, he began walking transects in the Central Valley and the Sierras, counting butterflies. He planned to do a study on how short-term weather variations affected butterfly populations. But the longer he sampled, the more valuable his data became, offering a signal through the noise of seasonal ups and downs. "And so here I am in Year 46," he said, nearly half a century of spending five days a week, from late spring to the end of autumn, observing butterflies. In that time he has watched overall numbers decline and seen some species that used to be everywhere - even species that "everyone regarded as a junk species" only a few decades ago - all but disappear. Shapiro believes that Krefeld-level declines are likely to be happening all over the globe. "But, of course, I don't cover the entire globe," he added. "I cover I-80."

There are also new efforts to set up more of the kind of insect-monitoring schemes researchers wish had existed decades ago, so that our current level of fallenness, at least, is captured. One is a pilot project in Germany similar to the Danish car study. To analyze what is caught, the researchers turned to volunteer naturalists, hobbyists similar to the ones in Krefeld, with the necessary breadth of knowledge to know what they're looking at. "These are not easy species to identify," says Aletta Bonn, of the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, who is overseeing the project. (The skills required for such work "are really extreme," Dunn says. "These people train for decades with other amateurs to be able to identify beetles based on their genitalia.") Bond would like to pay the volunteers for their expertise, she says, but funding hasn't caught up to the crisis. That didn't stop the "amateurs" from being willing to help: "They said, 'We're just curious what's in there, we would like to have samples.' "

Goulson says that Europe's tradition of amateur naturalism may account for why so many of the clues to the falloff in insect biodiversity originate there. (Tottrup's design for the car net in Denmark, for example, was itself adapted from the invention of a dedicated beetle-collecting hobbyist.) As little as we know about the status of European bugs, we know significantly less about other parts of the world. "We wouldn't know anything if it weren't for them," the so-called amateurs, Goulson told me. "We'd be entirely relying on the fact that there's no bugs on the windshield."

Thomas believes that this naturalist tradition is also why Europe is acting much faster than other places - for example, the United States - to address the decline of insects: Interest leads to tracking, which leads to awareness, which leads to concern, which leads to action. Since the Krefeld data emerged, there have been hearings about protecting insect biodiversity in the German Bundestag and the European Parliament. European Union member states voted to extend a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides and have begun to put money toward further studies of how abundance is changing, what is causing those changes and what can be done. When I knocked on the door of de Kroon's office, at Radboud University in the Dutch city Nijmegen, he was looking at some photos from another meeting he had that day: Willem-Alexander, the king of the Netherlands, had taken a tour of the city's efforts to make its riverside a friendlier habitat for bugs.

Stemming insect declines will require much more than this, however. The European Union already had some measures in place to help pollinators - including more strictly regulating pesticides than the United States does and paying farmers to create insect habitats by leaving fields fallow and allowing for wild edges alongside cultivation - but insect populations dropped anyway. New reports call for national governments to collaborate; for more creative approaches such as integrating insect habitats into the design of roads, power lines, railroads and other infrastructure; and, as always, for more studies. The necessary changes, like the causes, may be profound. "It's just another indication that we're destroying the life-support system of the planet," Lister says of the Puerto Rico study. "Nature's resilient, but we're pushing her to such extremes that eventually it will cause a collapse of the system."

Scientists hope that insects will have a chance to embody that resilience. While tigers tend to give birth to three or four cubs at a time, a ghost moth in Australia was once recorded laying 29,100 eggs, and she still had 15,000 in her ovaries. The fecund abundance that is insects' singular trait should enable them to recover, but only if they are given the space and the opportunity to do so.

"It's a debate we need to have urgently," Goulson says. "If we lose insects, life on earth will. ..." He trailed off, pausing for what felt like a long time.

In Denmark, Sune Boye Riis's transect with his car net took him past a bit of woods, some suburban lawns, some hedges, a Christmas-tree farm. The closest thing to a meadow that we passed was a large military property, on which the grass had been allowed to grow tall and golden. Riis had received instructions not to drive too fast, so traffic backed up behind us, and some people began to honk. "Well," Riis said, "so much for science." After three miles, he turned around and drove back toward the start. His windshield stayed mockingly clean.

Riis had four friends who were also participating in the study. They had a bet going among them: Who would net the biggest bug? "I'm way behind," Riis said. "A bumblebee is in the lead." His biggest catch? "A fly. Not even a big one."

At the end of the transect, Riis stopped at another parlous roadside spot, unfastened the net and removed the small bag at its tip. Some volunteers, captivated by what the study revealed about the world around them, asked the organizers for extra specimen bags, so they could do more sampling on their own. Some even asked if they could buy the entire car-net apparatus. Riis, though, was content to peer through the mesh, inside of which he could make out a number of black specks of varying tininess.

There was also a single butterfly, white-winged and delicate. Riis thought of the bet with his friends, for which the meaning of bigness had not been defined. He wondered how it might be reckoned. What gave a creature value?

"Is it weight?" he asked, staring down at the butterfly. In the big bag, it looked small and sad and alone. "Or is it grace?"

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The Insect Apocalypse Is Here (Published 2018)

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Feature What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth? Credit... Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman. Source photographs: Bridgeman Images. S une Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen, when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss.

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How One Company Pulls Carbon From the Air, Aiming to Avert a Climate Catastrophe 10 Dec 2018 NPR Special Series 

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How One Company Pulls Carbon From the Air, Aiming to Avert a Climate Catastrophe 10 Dec 2018 NPR Special Series 

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At a major climate meeting in Poland, nearly 200 countries are trying to reach a deal on dramatically reducing carbon emissions. But a recent U.N. report found that may not be enough to avoid dangerous impacts from the warming climate. In fact, the world is falling so far short of what's needed, it said, that it might be necessary to pull massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air.

The problem is that there's no feasible - let alone economical - way to do that yet. But there are a number of efforts underway to find one, including in the small, picturesque town of Squamish, British Columbia, an hour's drive north of Vancouver.

Carbon Engineering has been working for nearly a decade on the technology behind a "direct air capture" pilot plant, which sits just outside its office.

The process of capturing CO2 starts with an "air contactor," which looks like an oversized semitrailer with a huge fan on top. In front there's a black grill with a solution containing potassium hydroxide flowing down it, so it sounds like a waterfall. Once the solution meets the air, it captures and retains carbon dioxide.

That may sound simple, but it's not. Even though scientists say there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere now, it's at a very small concentration - only about 0.04 percent.

"So you have to pull in a huge volume of air to get that CO2, and that's really the trick to direct air capture," says Jenny McCahill, a chemist and engineer who works for Carbon Engineering.

Next, more chemicals are added and the solution is heated to create white pellets that look like the filling in bean bag chairs. These contain about 50 percent CO2.

Then the pellets are heated to 900 degrees Celsius (1,652 degrees Fahrenheit) to further concentrate the CO2 into a gas.

At this point the company could inject that underground. That's one way to address climate change. But there's no business model for that right now, and Carbon Engineering is looking for profits to help its technology expand.

To that end, it combines the CO2 gas with hydrogen extracted from water and makes a clear, synthetic fuel that McCahill says is similar to crude oil.

"It's a lot purer, so we don't have impurities like sulfur and nitrogen components that end up with that soot when you combust," she says.

Once this fuel is put through a refinery, McCahill says it can be turned into products such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.

But burning those emits carbon dioxide, so essentially carbon would just be moved around instead of reduced in the atmosphere. Still, the company argues there's an environmental benefit.

"We capture it again the next day and we make more fuel out of it," says company CEO Steve Oldham. "So the CO2 becomes recycled, and consequently there's no additional emissions from using fuel."

That's because Carbon Engineering's fuel would replace carbon-intensive fossil fuels. But that cleaner fuel comes with a cost.

"If we were to sell our fuel directly at the pump today, we're about 20 percent more expensive than regular gasoline," Oldham says.

Right now you can't buy this fuel, though, because the company's pilot plant removes just one ton of CO2 from the air each day and produces only about two barrels of synthetic fuel. But Oldham says his company is ready to start building larger plants.

With investors that include Bill Gates, Carbon Engineering has spent $30 million perfecting this process. The company says it can extract carbon dioxide from the air for less than $100 a ton, a claim two other companies, Climeworks and Global Thermostat, also make.

But some experts are skeptical this can be done that cheaply. It takes a lot of energy to move that much air and heat to concentrate the CO2. And energy costs money.

"The reality is, it's a lot cheaper to keep CO2 out of the air than to capture it once we get it into the air," says Howard Herzog, senior research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative. He thinks reducing emissions makes more economic sense than direct air capture technologies.

But many scientists argue it's too late to rely only on reducing emissions, with mounting projections of dire consequences from climate change.

"Certainly, in light of the recent climate reports, we don't have the option of simply avoiding carbon emissions any more. We now are at a point where we need to start removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere," says Jennifer Wilcox, chemical engineering professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Wilcox says this technology shouldn't be seen as the one solution to climate change. But combined with many other efforts, she thinks it could make a valuable contribution.

Still, Wilcox and others say the technology needs more research and development.

"I see this industry similar to the renewable energy industry, maybe 20 or 30 years ago," says Carbon180 Executive Director Noah Deich. His group in Oakland, Calif., advocates for an economy that removes more carbon than it emits.

Deich says direct air capture needs the kind of private and government investment that helped wind and solar grow. Earlier this year Congress did expand tax credits for extracting carbon.

"I think an even bigger opportunity on the policy front is in California," Deich says. The state's Low Carbon Fuel Standard includes a carbon trading program for transportation fuels such as gasoline. That could be a big boost for Carbon Engineering's fuel.

Carbon Engineering's Oldham also wants more governments to put a price, or tax, on carbon dioxide emissions. "It will force companies that have a carbon footprint today to find ways to mitigate that carbon footprint, and we're a very good way of doing so," he says.

Oldham says his company plans to soon build its first full-size plant, one that will remove much more carbon dioxide from the air and run on renewable energy. (The pilot plant uses natural gas.)

If all goes well, he hopes it will become a model for many more such plants in the near future.

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How One Company Pulls Carbon From The Air, Aiming To Avert A Climate Catastrophe

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At a major climate meeting in Poland, nearly 200 countries are trying to reach a deal on dramatically reducing carbon emissions. But a recent U.N. report found that may not be enough to avoid dangerous impacts from the warming climate.

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Greenland’s Melting Ice Nears a ‘Tipping Point,’ Scientists Say; The New York Times Climate Forward newsletter 21 Jan 2019, John Schwartz

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Greenland’s Melting Ice Nears a ‘Tipping Point,’ Scientists Say; The New York Times Climate Forward newsletter 21 Jan 2019, John Schwartz

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Greenland's ice is melting so fast that it could become a major factor in sea-level rise around the world within two decades, scientists said in a new study. Credit Credit... Lucas Jackson/Reuters

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Greenland's enormous ice sheet is melting at such an accelerated rate that it may have reached a "tipping point" and could become a major factor in sea-level rise around the world within two decades, scientists said in a study published on Monday.

The Arctic is warming at twice the average rate of the rest of the planet, and the new research adds to the evidence that the ice loss in Greenland, which lies mainly above the Arctic Circle, is speeding up as the warming increases. The authors found that ice loss in 2012, more than 400 billion tons per year, was nearly four times the rate in 2003. After a lull in 2013-14, losses have resumed.

The study is the latest in a series of papers published this month suggesting that scientific estimates of the effects of a warming planet have been, if anything, too conservative. Just a week ago, a separate study of ice loss in Antarctica found that the continent is contributing more to rising sea levels than previously thought.

Another new analysis suggested that the oceans are warming far faster than earlier estimates. Warming oceans are currently the leading cause of sea-level rise, since water expands as it warms.

Researchers said these findings underscored the need for action to curb emissions of planet-warming gases and avoid the worst effects of climate change.
[A record number of Americans are concerned about global warming, a new poll found.]
Rising sea levels are one of the clearest consequences of global warming; they are caused both by thermal expansion of the oceans and by the melting of ice sheets on land. Current projections say that if the planet warms by two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial times, average sea levels will rise by more than two feet, and 32 million to 80 million people will be exposed to coastal flooding.

Much of the previous research on Greenland's ice has dealt with the southeast and northeast parts of the island, where large chunks of glacial ice calve into the sea. The new paper focuses on the ice-covered stretches of southwest Greenland, which has few large glaciers and was not generally considered as important a source of ice loss.

But as the earth warms, the paper concludes, the vast plains of southwestern ice will increasingly melt, with the meltwater flowing to the ocean. Within two decades, it says, the region "will become a major contributor to sea level rise."

The study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used satellite data and ground-based instruments to measure Greenland's ice loss in the 21st century. It looked closely at what seemed to be a pause in the ice loss for about a year, beginning in 2013, that followed a stretch of greatly accelerated melting.

The researchers tied the pause in melting to a reversal of the cyclical weather phenomenon known as the North Atlantic Oscillation. Before the pause, the oscillation was in what is known as its negative phase, which is associated with warmer air hitting west Greenland, along with less snowfall and more sunlight, all of which contribute to ice loss. When the cycle shifted into a positive phase in 2013, an "abrupt slowdown" of melting occurred.

Yet, the slowdown was anything but good news, said Michael Bevis, the lead author of the paper and a professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University.

The North Atlantic Oscillation has occurred throughout the historical record, he noted. But before 2000, overall average temperatures were cool enough that the N.A.O.'s positive and negative cycles did not have much of an effect on rates of melting in Greenland.

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A scientist repaired a GPS device last summer near Greenland's Helheim Glacier. Credit... Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Now, the strong effect that the cooler cycle had on the rate of melting - even if it was helpful in stopping ice loss - is a reason for concern, Dr. Bevis said. If the warm cycles of the N.A.O. are associated with huge losses of ice, and the cool cycles only pause the melting, it suggests a threshold has been reached: As average temperatures rise further, melting will be more sustained, and the cooling cycles will have less of an effect in slowing the ice loss.

"If a relatively minor cycle can cause massive melting," he said, "it means you've reached a point of amazing sensitivity" to warmer temperatures, which could represent "the tipping point."

And so, he said, "One degree of warming in the future will have way more impact than one degree of warming in the last century."

The new research dovetails with other recent papers on the accelerating melting. Last month a team of researchers published a paper in Nature that used satellite observations, analysis of ice cores and models to show that losses from the Greenland ice sheet have reached their fastest rate in at least 350 years.

At the other end of the earth, the speed of Antarctica's ice loss is also becoming clearer. A study published last week, also in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, surveyed four decades of data and found faster losses in some regions than scientists had previously estimated.

The continent has presented a mixed story in recent years, with researchers measuring substantial losses in some regions but stability and even gains in others. But the new paper found considerable losses of glacial ice in East Antarctica, previously considered to be relatively stable. As a whole, Antarctica lost about 40 billion tons of ice per year in the 1980s, but it has been losing roughly 250 billion tons per year in the past decade.

That new paper adds to a body of recent research showing that Antarctica's ice loss is accelerating, including a study in June that found that the rate of ice loss had tripled since 2007. Scientists estimate the Antarctic melting will contribute six inches to sea-level rise by 2100.

Luke D. Trusel, a glaciologist at Rowan University and an author of last month's Nature paper on Greenland, said the new research by Dr. Bevis and his colleagues "provides clear and further illustration of how sensitive Greenland now is" to global warming.

"What's happening today is well beyond the range of what could be expected naturally," he said. "The human fingerprint on Greenland melting today is unequivocal."

Still, he said, most estimates of a tipping point for Greenland ice loss cite higher average temperatures than are currently occurring, more along the lines of 1.5 or two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Global average temperatures have already increased by about one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

A co-author of the Nature paper, Sarah B. Das, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, agreed that Dr. Bevis's study reinforced her own team's conclusions and showed "how quickly Greenland is disappearing." The common finding, she said, is that climate change has brought Greenland to a state in which "a little bit of a nudge is going to have an outsized impact," causing enormous melting.

But, she said, "I take issue with using 'tipping point' to describe the accelerating mass loss Greenland is experiencing," because "it makes it appear as if we have passed, or soon will pass, the point of no return." She said she saw reasons for hope.

Dr. Trusel agreed that talk of tipping points could discount humans' ability to mitigate global warming. "We may be able to control how rapidly the ice sheet changes in the future," he said.

"By limiting greenhouse gas emissions we limit warming, and thus also limit how rapidly and intensely Greenland affects our livelihoods through sea-level rise," he added. "That, it seems, is our call to make."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

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Greenland's Melting Ice Nears a 'Tipping Point,' Scientists Say (Published 2019)

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. Greenland's enormous ice sheet is melting at such an accelerated rate that it may have reached a "tipping point" and could become a major factor in sea-level rise around the world within two decades, scientists said in a study published on Monday.

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Brace for the Polar Vortex; It May Be Visiting More Often 18 January 2019, Kendra Pierre-Louis

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Brace for the Polar Vortex; It May Be Visiting More Often 18 January 2019, Kendra Pierre-Louis

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Updated Jan. 28, 2019

Find your long johns, break out the thick socks and raid the supermarket. After a month of relatively mild winter weather, the Midwest and the East Coast are experiencing what has become a seasonal rite of passage: the polar vortex.

The phrase has become synonymous with frigid temperatures that make snowstorms more likely. And if it seems as if these polar freezes are happening more often, you're right. "They are definitely becoming more common," said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. "There have been a couple of studies that have documented that."

Colder temperatures have been arriving later in winter over the past few years, according to Judah Cohen, a climatologist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a weather risk assessment firm. But because of changes to the polar vortex, when wintry weather does arrive, it's often more intense - witness the four back-to-back nor'easters last year.

"I've been making that argument that winter is shortening, but you're getting these more intensive periods in that shorter winter," Dr. Cohen said.
[If it's so cold outside, what happened to global warming? Read our explainer.

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A satellite image of low pressure from the polar vortex swooping across North America in January 2014. Credit... NOAA, via Getty Images

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Scientists are still trying to figure out why these intense arctic chills are flooding southward more frequently. To understand their thinking, it helps to understand the nature of the polar vortex. While the expression became broadly popular during an unusually cold winter in 2014, the vortex was known to meteorologists long before that.

The term refers to circular bands of winds near the poles that are strongest in wintertime and well above the jet stream in the stratosphere. The stratosphere is an atmospheric layer that extends roughly seven to 31 miles above the earth.

Usually, those circular bands act as walls that keep the teeth-chattering cold air locked at the poles. But, every so often, the winds break down and allow the cold air to escape. That's what happened at the beginning of January, when the polar vortex split into three separate bands.

It's this escaping polar air that is dropping temperatures in the Midwest and the East - there's a lag time between the atmospheric event and when we experience the effects. The broken vortex is also sending icy temperatures to much of Europe in what some call the "Beast From the East."

Some researchers, including Dr. Francis and Dr. Cohen, say they suspect that the more frequent polar vortex breakdowns can be tied to climate change.

While climate change is warming the earth, not all parts of the earth are warming at the same rate; the Arctic is warming at a rate twice as fast as the world average. That warming has led to historically low levels of sea ice in the region. The melting sea ice, particularly in an area near the Barents and Kara Seas off Siberia, may be linked to the changes in the polar vortex.

"When we lose a lot of ice in that particular area in the summer, it absorbs a lot of extra heat from the sun," Dr. Francis said. This is because the darker open ocean absorbs more heat than reflective ice. "And so we see a very persistent, hot spot there in terms of temperature differences from what they should be."

Research suggests that the hot spot, along with changes in the jet stream driven by climate change, cause the polar vortex to break down in mid- to late winter.

"As the Arctic gets warmer and warmer, the severe weather picks up," Dr. Cohen said.

In October, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted a milder than average winter, but that is not necessarily at odds with the January chill.

"There's a difference between some seasonal outlooks such as NOAA's that look at the whole three-month period and others that may be breaking it down month by month," said Bob Henson, a meteorologist with the forecasting service Weather Underground. "It's quite possible the winter will average warm for December through February. But that may well manifest as the extreme warmth we've seen over the last month followed by some much colder and colder than average conditions into February."

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

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Brace for the Polar Vortex; It May Be Visiting More Often (Published 2019)

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Updated Jan. 28, 2019 Find your long johns, break out the thick socks and raid the supermarket. After a month of relatively mild winter weather, the Midwest and the East Coast are experiencing what has become a seasonal rite of passage: the polar vortex.

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Climate Change in the American Mind: December 2018; Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Report Summary 22 January 2019

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Climate Change in the American Mind: December 2018; Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Report Summary 22 January 2019

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Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

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Our latest national survey finds that a large majority of Americans think global warming is happening, outnumbering those who don't by more than 5 to 1. Americans are also growing more certain that global warming is happening and more aware that it is caused by human activities. Certainty has increased 14 percentage points since March 2015, with 51% of the public now "extremely" or "very sure" that global warming is happening. Sixty-two percent of the public now understands that global warming is caused mostly by human activities, an increase of 10 points over that same time period.

This report is based on findings from a nationally representative survey - Climate Change in the American Mind - conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (climatecommunication.yale.edu) and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication (climatechangecommunication.org), Interview dates: November 28 - December 11, 2018. Interviews: 1,114 Adults (18+). Average margin of error +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

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Climate Change in the American Mind: December 2018

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Our latest national survey finds that a large majority of Americans think global warming is happening, outnumbering those who don't by more than 5 to 1. Americans are also growing more certain that global warming is happening and more aware that it is caused by human activities.

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Capturing carbon to fight climate change is dividing environmentalists 

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Capturing carbon to fight climate change is dividing environmentalists 

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Green Technology Magazine, 1 Feb 2019

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Georgetown University and Holly Jean Buck, University of California, Los Angeles

Environmental activists are teaming up with fresh faces in Congress to advocate for a Green New Deal, a bundle of policies that would fight climate change while creating new jobs and reducing inequality. Not all of the activists agree on what those policies ought to be.

Some 626 environmental groups, including Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity and 350, recently laid out their vision in a letter they sent to U.S. lawmakers. They warned that they "vigorously oppose" several strategies, including the use of carbon capture and storage - a process that can trap excess carbon pollution that's already warming the Earth, and lock it away.

In our view, as a political philosopher who studies global justice and an environmental social scientist, this blanket opposition is an unfortunate mistake. Based on the need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and the risks in relying on land sinks like forests and soils alone to take up the excess carbon, we believe that carbon capture and storage could be a powerful tool for making the climate safer and even rectifying historical climate injustices.

Global inequality

We think the U.S. and other rich countries should accelerate negative emissions research for two reasons.

First, they can afford it. Second, they have a historical responsibility as they burned a disproportionate amount of the carbon causing climate change today. Global warming is poised to hit the least-developed countries, including dozens that were colonized by these wealthier nations, the hardest.

Consider this: The entire African continent emits less carbon than the U.S., Russia or Japan.

Yet Africa is likely to experience climate change impacts sooner and more intensely than any other region. Some African regions are already experiencing warming increases at more than twice the global rate. Coastal and island nations like Bangladesh, Madagascar and the Marshall Islands face near or total destruction.

But the world's richest nations have been slow to endorse and support the necessary research, development and governance for negative emissions technologies.

Bad track record with coal

What explains the objections from climate justice advocates?

The U.S. has heavily funded experiments with carbon capture and storage to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from new coal-fired power plants since George W. Bush's presidency.

Those efforts have not paid off, partly because of economics. Natural gas and renewable energy have become cheaper and more popular than coal for generating electricity.

Only a handful of coal-fired power plants are under construction in the U.S., where closures are routine. The industry is in trouble everywhere, with few exceptions.

In addition, carbon capture with coal has a bad track record. The biggest U.S. experiment is the US$7.5 billion Kemper power plant in Mississippi. It ended in failure in 2017 when state power authorities ordered the plant operator to give up on this technology and rely on natural gas instead.

Other uses

Carbon capture and storage, however, isn't just for fossil-fuel-burning power plants. It can work with industrial carbon dioxide sources, such as steel, cement and chemical plants and incinerators.

Then, one of two things can happen. The carbon can be turned into new products, such as fuels, cement, soft drinks or even shoes.

Carbon can also be stored permanently if it is injected underground, where geologists believe it can stay put for centuries.

Until now, a common use for captured carbon is extracting oil out of old wells. Burning that petroleum, however, can make climate change worse.

Going carbon negative

This technology may potentially also remove more carbon than gets emitted - as long as it's designed right.

One example is what's called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, where farm residues or crops like trees or grasses are grown to be burned to generate electricity. Carbon is separated out and stored at the power plants where this happens.

If the supply chain is sustainable, with cultivation, harvesting and transport done in low-carbon or carbon-neutral ways, this process can produce what scientists call negative emissions, with more carbon removed than released. Another possibility involves directly capturing carbon from the air.

Scientists point out that bioenergy with carbon capture and storage could require vast amounts of land for growing biofuels to burn. And climate advocates are concerned that both approaches could pave the way for oil, gas and coal companies and big industries to simply continue with business as usual instead of phasing out fossil fuels.

Natural solutions

Every pathway to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in the most recent U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projected the use of carbon removal approaches.

Planting more trees, composting and farming in ways that store carbon in soils and protecting wetlands can also reduce atmospheric carbon. We believe the natural solutions many environmentalists might prefer are crucial. But soaking up excess carbon through afforestation on a massive scale could encroach on farmland.

To be sure, not all environmentalists are writing off carbon capture and storage.

The Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council, along with many other big green organizations, did not sign the letter, which objected not just to carbon capture and storage but also to nuclear power, emissions trading and converting trash into energy through incineration.

Rather than leave carbon removal technologies out of the Green New Deal, we suggest that more environmentalists consider their potential for removing carbon that has already been emitted. We believe these approaches could potentially create jobs, foster economic development and reduce inequality on a global scale - as long as they are meaningfully accountable to people in the world's poorest nations.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University and Holly Jean Buck, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of California, Los Angeles

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Capturing carbon to fight climate change is dividing environmentalists - Green Technology

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Georgetown University and Holly Jean Buck, University of California, Los Angeles Environmental activists are teaming up with fresh faces in Congress to advocate for a Green New Deal, a bundle of policies that would fight climate change while creating new jobs and reducing inequality.

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Coastal DEMS make 3-d maps of coasts that help understand and predict changes in Earth’s environment. 

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Coastal DEMS make 3-d maps of coasts that help understand and predict changes in Earth’s environment. 

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The CIRES coastal digital elevation model (DEM) team is located in NOAA's David Skaggs Research Center in Boulder, Colorado and is funded primarily by NOAA Line Offices through a Cooperative Agreement with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). A companion website at NCEI has more details on the role of our group within NOAA.

To meet our team visit our About Us page.

We develop high-resolution, three-dimensional computer models of coastal regions throughout the United States and select international territories. Our DEMs are available here. Our DEMs integrate land and seafloor topography to depict Earth's solid surface and are made from public land and seafloor elevation data collected by federal, state and local governments, universities and private companies. Our models help plan, prepare for and better understand ocean processes and have a wide range of scientific and technical uses such as tsunami and storm-surge forecasting and warning, hazard mitigation and community preparedness, ecosystem management and habitat research, coastal change and terrain analysis.

Projects

National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program (NTHMP)
Read More

Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL)
Read More

Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013
Read More

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The CIRES coastal digital elevation model (DEM) team is located in NOAA's David Skaggs Research Center in Boulder, Colorado and is funded primarily by NOAA Line Offices through a Cooperative Agreement with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). A companion website at NCEI has more details on the role of our group within NOAA.

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An independently operated and funded research organization focusing on climate science and strategic analysis.

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Globally, October 2020 was the fifth warmest October since record-keeping began in 1850. La Niña conditions strengthened in October, significantly reducing the likelihood that 2020 sets a new record for warmest year.

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Globally, October 2020 was the fifth warmest October since record-keeping began in 1850. La Niña conditions strengthened in October, significantly reducing the likelihood that 2020 sets a new record for warmest year.

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Becoming Greta: Invisible (school) Girl to Global Climate Activist…” Somini Segupta 18 Feb 2019

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Becoming Greta: Invisible (school) Girl to Global Climate Activist…” Somini Segupta 18 Feb 2019

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Greta Thunberg, center, skips school on Fridays to demonstrate for climate action at the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm. Credit... Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

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STOCKHOLM - It's complicated being Greta.

Small, shy, survivor of crippling depression, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish girl skipping school to shame the world into addressing climate change, drew a parade of fans one Friday in February on a frozen square in Stockholm.

Six Swiss students had traveled 26 hours by train to seek her support for their petition for a tougher Swiss carbon emissions law. An Italian scientist told her she reminded him of his younger, activist self. A television news crew hovered around her. Women from an antismoking group came to give her a T-shirt.

Greta nodded, whispered, "Thanks," posed for pictures. Made exactly zero small talk.

All this attention, she said out of earshot of the others, is great. It means "people are listening." But then, a knife-blade flash of rage revealed itself.

"It's sometimes annoying when people say, 'Oh you children, you young people are the hope. You will save the world'" she said, after several grown-ups had told her just that. "I think it would be helpful if you could help us just a little bit."

This is signature Greta. Wry. Blunt. Sometimes sarcastic. The opposite of sweet.

It surfaced again on Friday, when Prime Minister Theresa May's office dismissed school walkouts in Britain as a distraction that "wastes lesson time." Greta swiftly struck back on Twitter: "But then again, political leaders have wasted 30 yrs of inaction. And that is slightly worse."

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Margot Wallstrom, the deputy prime minister of Sweden, left, met with Greta on a recent Friday. Credit... Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

Like a modern-day Cassandra for the age of climate change, her solitary act of civil disobedience - this was the 25th time that she skipped school to protest at Parliament - has turned her into something of a global commodity. It has inspired huge children's demonstrations elsewhere, prompted a debate about whether children should skip classes for climate action, and invited trolls, haters and skeptics who wonder who profits from Greta.

The last six months have been, as she said, "a weird contrast." They have compelled her to talk, talk a lot, which is something she is not accustomed to.

"All my life I've been invisible, the invisible girl in the back who doesn't say anything," she said. "From one day to another, people listen to me. That's a weird contrast. It's hard."

"It's sometimes annoying when people say, 'Oh you children, you young people are the hope. You will save the world,'" Greta said. "I think it would be helpful if you could help us just a little bit." Credit... Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

At midday, as the sky turned gray, her father, Svante, brought lunch. Chickpeas and rice, which she ate, standing, alone in the crowd, in minute forkfuls, like a bird, before receiving a gaggle of third-graders in snowsuits. By the end of the afternoon, a full 7 hours standing outside in the cold, she was very tired. All she wanted to do, she said, was to go home and lie on the couch with her dogs.

Greta Thunberg is an unlikely, though not entirely accidental, activist.

The eldest of two girls, she grew up in Stockholm. She studied piano and ballet and theater. She did well in school. Like many children, she watched educational films about the melting Arctic and the fate of the polar bears and the marine mammals bloated with plastic. But unlike other children, she couldn't let them go. "I became very affected. I began thinking about it all the time and I became very sad," she said. "Those pictures were stuck in my head."

Adolescence brought social pressures. She wasn't into the things that many other kids were into. Mobile phones. Clothes. None of it interested her, her father recalled. "I think she was very isolated and very lonely," Mr. Thunberg said.

By age 11, Greta had fallen into a deep funk. She stopped going to school. She stopped eating. She stopped growing. She spoke only to family, and, at school, only to one teacher, Anita von Berens.

"Before, my own world was very big," she recalled. "I was all alone."

Is the alone-world still there?

"Yes," she readily replied. "But it's getting smaller and the real world is getting bigger."

"I'm happier now," she added. "I have meaning. I have something I have to do."

Greta with Roxy, her Labrador retriever. Credit... Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

It was a cold, silver Saturday morning, the day after her weekly school strike. Mr. Thunberg had brought her to see the horse her family keeps and shares with other children in a stable outside the city. Greta brushed the animal, an Icelandic horse named Freyja. "Like a massage," she said. She cleaned the gunk from its hooves. "Mostly poop," she said. She tried to keep her black Lab, Roxy, from gobbling the stuff off the snow. "Hopeless," she grumbled.

Freyja, she said, is very stubborn, and it took her some time to get the bit into the horse's mouth before taking her for a slow ride in the woods. Being with her horse calms her, Greta said. The trees should be covered in snow by this time. It has snowed less than normal this year, she said.

She remains tiny for her age, a consequence of barely eating during her struggle with depression. She doesn't laugh much, or make small talk.

Or, as she puts it, "I only say what's necessary."

She prefers the company of adults and animals to children of her own age. Bullying and depression have taken a toll.

Getting through the rough patch took months. Greta said what made her feel better was to be heard, first by her parents. She goaded them to stop eating meat. Then she goaded them to become vegan, which they also did, except that, according to Greta, her mother, Malena Ernman, continues to sneak in cheese. "At night, so I won't see it," Greta said.

Her most important victory came when, in 2016, she persuaded her mother to stop flying, which was a big deal because Ms. Ernman is an opera singer well-known in Sweden whose career depends on traveling widely. Soon came a flurry of attention to the no-fly decision and, eventually, a book that Ms. Ernman and Mr. Thunberg wrote about how their child had changed them.

"It felt very good to be listened to," Greta said.

"One of the pros of having a famous mother," Greta said, is that "I'm quite familiar with the media and how it works." Credit... Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

On Monday, Aug. 20, around the time her parents' book came out, she sat in front of the Swedish Parliament. Word quickly spread. Soon came an invitation to the United Nations climate conference and another to the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, where she told a roomful of business leaders that their financial success had "come with an unthinkable price tag" for the planet.

Greta, for her part, has told her mother not to join her at the protests. She said she does not want anyone to think her mother put her up to it. (Through her husband, Ms. Ernman declined to be interviewed.)

Being Ms. Ernman's daughter prepared Greta for this role. "That's one of the pros of having a famous mother," she said. "I'm quite familiar with the media and how it works."

Only once, when she confronted journalists lined up to interview her at Davos, did she freeze. Like before, the words didn't come.

These days, she said, she thinks carefully about everything she does - what she wears, what she says, whom she connects with on Facebook. She curates her social media carefully, posting a picture of herself riding back from Davos by train, which drew attention to the conference participants who had chartered private jets.

Sometimes, her public role brings unwelcome attention. A plastic-wrapped sandwich in one of the pictures on the train brought criticism. A German politician, Paul Ziemiak, challenged her on Twitter recently by posting an unflattering emoji of a monkey covering its eyes. He was roundly criticized for picking on a child.

And an investigation by the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet asserted that Greta's name and photograph had been used to raise money for a start-up. (Mr. Thunberg said the family had not been informed; the start-up founder, Ingmar Rentzhog, confirmed that Greta's name and photo had appeared in a financial prospectus for the start-up without the family's prior knowledge but he denied that her name had been used to raise capital.)

It prompted Greta to write a long Facebook post, declaring that she is acting independently and that neither she nor her family are accepting any money.

Her former teacher, Ms. von Berens, marveled at her transformation. She also wondered what would happen next, when the attention fades. "I don't think this will be forever," she said.

As for Greta, this is her last semester of 9th grade. She is weighing whether to take a year off to pursue her activism full time.

Asked if she would go to New York in September for the United Nations climate summit if invited, Greta said she would not fly. But, she could sail there on a ship. And she's learned that going on a container ship would have the smallest carbon footprint.

Credit... Elisabeth Ubbe for The New York Times

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin and Christina Anderson from Stockholm.

For more news on climate and the environment, follow @NYTClimate on Twitter.

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Becoming Greta: 'Invisible Girl' to Global Climate Activist, With Bumps Along the Way (Published 2019)

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Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd: , our email newsletter. STOCKHOLM - It's complicated being Greta. Small, shy, survivor of crippling depression, Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish girl skipping school to shame the world into addressing climate change, drew a parade of fans one Friday in February on a frozen square in Stockholm.

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(Mapping of coastlines as sea levels rise)

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The 2020 Super Bowl stadium could experience
occasional flooding from sea level rise by 2070...

With Florida's coastal areas already facing increased flood risk from high tide flooding and extreme rainfall events, Climate Central looked into how sea level rise may affect Miami's Hard Rock Stadium, this year's Super Bowl host.

Our analysis found most of the stadium property faces exposure to annual flood risk by 2070, if emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to grow unchecked⁠⁠.

...Read More

The Facts About Sea Level Rise

Global warming has raised global sea level about 8 inches since 1880, and the rate of rise is accelerating. Rising seas dramatically increase the odds of damaging floods from storm surges. A Climate Central analysis finds the odds of "century" or worse floods occurring by 2030 are on track to double or more, over widespread areas of the U.S. These increases threaten an enormous amount of damage. Across the country, nearly 5 million people live in 2.6 million homes at less than 4 feet above high tide - a level lower than the century flood line for most locations analyzed. And compounding this risk, scientists expect roughly 2 to 7 more feet of sea level rise this century - a lot depending upon how much more heat-trapping pollution humanity puts into the sky.

Explore

Search or navigate our interactive tools above to see maps of areas below different amounts of sea level rise and flooding, down to neighborhood scale, matched with area timelines of risk. The tool also provides statistics of population, homes and land affected by city, county and state, plus links to factsheets, data downloads, action plans, embeddable widgets, and more.

Interested in supporting the Program on Sea Level Rise or Climate Central generally? Make a gift online or contact Barbara Charbonnet at 201-321-8301 or by email at barbcharb@climatecentral.org.

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Surging Seas Sea level rise analysis by Climate Central

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With Florida's coastal areas already facing increased flood risk from high tide flooding and extreme rainfall events, Climate Central looked into how sea level rise may affect Miami's Hard Rock Stadium, this year's Super Bowl host. Our analysis found most of the stadium property faces exposure to annual flood risk by 2070, if emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to grow unchecked⁠⁠.

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Truthdig, Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth, Chris Hedges

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Truthdig, Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth, Chris Hedges

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Truthdig: Expert Reporting, Current News, Provocative Columnists

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Editor's note: The U.S. Senate on Thursday confirmed a former oil and mining industry lobbyist as secretary of the interior. President Donald Trump's nomination of David Bernhardt, a government official during the George W. Bush administration, easily survived challenges by environmentally minded senators and others. It came amid rapidly mounting scientific evidence that global warming is an existential threat to huge numbers of species, including Homo sapiens. In the reposted column below, first published on Truthdig on Aug. 19, 2018, Chris Hedges writes about climate change and interviews a scientist who is among the many warning about what they call the monumental damage that human-made emissions are causing to the atmosphere and the planet. Hedges will return with a new column next Monday.
The spectacular rise of human civilization-its agrarian societies, cities, states, empires and industrial and technological advances ranging from irrigation and the use of metals to nuclear fusion-took place during the last 10,000 years, after the last ice age. Much of North America was buried, before the ice retreated, under sheets eight times the height of the Empire State Building. This tiny span of time on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old is known as the Holocene Age. It now appears to be coming to an end with the refusal of our species to significantly curb the carbon emissions and pollutants that might cause human extinction. The human-induced change to the ecosystem, at least for many thousands of years, will probably make the biosphere inhospitable to most forms of life.

The planet is transitioning under our onslaught to a new era called the Anthropocene. This era is the product of violent conquest, warfare, slavery, genocide and the Industrial Revolution, which began about 200 years ago and saw humans start to burn a hundred million years of sunlight stored in the form of coal and petroleum. The numbers of humans climbed to over 7 billion. Air, water, ice and rock, which are interdependent, changed. Temperatures climbed. The Anthropocene, for humans and most other species, will most likely conclude with extinction or a massive die-off, as well as climate conditions that will preclude most known life forms. We engineered our march toward collective suicide although global warming was first identified in 1896 by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius.

The failure to act to ameliorate global warming exposes the myth of human progress and the illusion that we are rational creatures. We ignore the wisdom of the past and the stark scientific facts before us. We are entranced by electronic hallucinations and burlesque acts, including those emanating from the centers of power, and this ensures our doom. Speak this unpleasant truth and you are condemned by much of society. The mania for hope and magical thinking is as seductive in the Industrial Age as it was in pre-modern societies.

Ate and Nemesis were minor deities who were evoked in ancient Greek drama. Those infected with hubris, the Greeks warned, lost touch with the sacred, believed they could defy fate, or fortuna, and abandoned humility and virtue. They thought of themselves as gods. Their hubris blinded them to human limits and led them to carry out acts of suicidal folly, embodied in the god Ate. This provoked the wrath of the other gods. Divine retribution, in the form of Nemesis, led to tragedy and death and then restored balance and order, once those poisoned with hubris were eradicated. "Too late, too late you see the path of wisdom," the Chorus in the play "Antigone" tells Creon, ruler of Thebes, whose family has died because of his hubris.

"We're probably not the first time there's been a civilization in the universe," Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and the author of " Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth," told me when we met in New York.

"The idea that we're destroying the planet gives us way too much credit," he went on. "Certainly, we're pushing the earth into a new era. If we look at the history of the biosphere, the history of life on earth, in the long run, the earth is just going to pick that up and do what is interesting for it. It will run new evolutionary experiments. We, on the other hand, may not be a part of that experiment."

Civilizations probably have risen elsewhere in the universe, developed complex societies and then died because of their own technological advances. Every star in the night sky is believed to be circled by planets, some 10 billion trillion of which astronomers such as Frank Drake estimate are hospitable to life.

"If you develop an industrial civilization like ours, the route is going to be the same," Adam Frank said. "You're going to have a hard time not triggering climate change."

Astronomers call the inevitable death of advanced civilizations across the universe "the great filter." Robin Hanson in the essay "The Great Filter-Are We Almost Past It?" argues that advanced civilizations hit a wall or a barrier that makes continued existence impossible. The more that human societies evolve, according to Hanson, the more they become "energy intensive" and ensure their own obliteration. This is why, many astronomers theorize, we have not encountered other advanced civilizations in the universe. They destroyed themselves.

"For a civilization to destroy itself through nuclear war, it has to have certain emotional characteristics," Frank said. "You can imagine certain civilizations saying, 'I'm not building those [nuclear weapons]. Those are crazy.' But climate change, you can't get away from. If you build a civilization, you're using huge amounts of energy. The energy feeds back on the planet, and you're going to push yourself into a kind of Anthropocene. It's probably universal."

Frank said that our inability to project ourselves into a future beyond our own life spans makes it hard for us to grasp the reality and consequences of severe climate change. Scenarios for dramatic climate change often center around the year 2100, when most adults living now will be dead. Although this projection may turn out to be overly optimistic given the accelerating rate of climate change, it allows societies to ignore-because it is outside the life span of most living adults-the slow-motion tsunami that is occurring.

"We think we're not a part of the biosphere-that we're above it-that we're special," Frank said. "We're not special."

"We're the experiment that the biosphere is running now," he said. "A hundred million years ago, it was grassland. Grasslands were a new evolutionary innovation. They changed the planet, changed how the planet worked. Then the planet went on and did things with it. Industrial civilization is the latest experiment. We will keep being a part of that experiment or, with the way that we're pushing the biosphere, it will just move on without us."

"We have been sending probes to every other planet in the solar system for the last 60 years," he said. "We have rovers running around on Mars. We've learned generically how planets work. From Venus, we've learned about the runaway greenhouse effect. On Venus the temperature is 800 degrees. You can melt lead [there]. Mars is a totally dry, barren world now. But it used to have an ocean. It used to be a blue world. We have models that can predict the climate. I can predict the weather on Mars tomorrow via these climate models. People who think the only way we can understand climate is by studying the earth now, that's completely untrue. These other worlds-Mars, Venus, Titan. Titan is a moon of Saturn that has an amazingly rich atmosphere. They all teach us how to think like a planet. They have taught us generically how planets behave."

Frank points out that much of the configurations of the ecosystem on which we depend have not always been part of the planet's biosphere. This includes the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water and warm air up from Florida to Boston and out across the Atlantic.

"Hundreds of millions of people in some of Earth's most technologically advanced cities rely on the mild climate delivered by the Gulf Stream," Frank writes in "Light of the Stars." "But the Gulf Stream is nothing more than a particular circulation pattern formed during a particular climate state the Earth settled into after the last ice age ended. It is not a permanent fixture of the planet."

"Everything we think about the earth just happens to be this one moment we found it in," he told me. "We're pushing it [the planet] and we're pushing it hard. We don't have much time to make these transitions. What people have to understand is that climate change is our cosmic adolescence. We should have expected this. The question is not 'did we change the climate?' It's 'of course we changed the climate. What else did you expect to have happened?' We're like a teenager who has been given this power over ourselves. Just like how you give a teenager the keys to the car, there's this moment where you're like, 'Oh my God I hope you make it.' And that's what we are."

"Climate change is not a problem we have to make go away, in a sense that you don't make adolescence go away," Frank said. "It is a dangerous transition that you have to navigate. ... The question is are we smart enough to deal with the effects of our own power? Climate change is not a pollution problem. It's not like any environmental problem we've faced before. In some sense, it's not an environmental problem but a planetary transition. We've already pushed the earth into it. We're going to have to evolve a new way of being a civilization, fundamentally."

"We will either evolve those group behaviors quickly or the earth will take what we've given it, in terms of new climate states, and move on and create new species," he said.

Frank said the mathematical models for the future of the planet have three trajectories. One is a massive die-off of perhaps 70 percent of the human population and then an uneasy stabilization. The second is complete collapse and extinction. The third is a dramatic reconfiguration of human society to protect the biosphere and make it more diverse and productive not for human beings but for the health of the planet. This would include halting our consumption of fossil fuels, converting to a plant-based diet and dismantling the animal agriculture industry as well as greening deserts and restoring rainforests.

There is, Frank warned, a tipping point when the biosphere becomes so degraded no human activity will halt runaway climate change. He cites Venus again.

"The water on Venus got lost slowly," he said. "The CO 2 built up. There was no way to take it out of the atmosphere. It gets hotter. The fact that it gets hotter makes it even hotter. Which makes it even hotter. That's what would happen in the collapse model. Planets have minds of their own. They are super-complex systems. Once you get the ball rolling down the hill. ... This is the greatest fear. This is why we don't want to go past 2 degrees [Celsius] of climate change. We're scared that once you get past 2 degrees, the planet's own internal mechanisms kick in. The population comes down like a stone. A complete collapse. You lose the civilization entirely."

Chris Hedges writes a weekly opinion column for Truthdig. He has written 12 books, including the New York Times best-seller "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt" (2012), which he co-authored with the...

Mr. Fish, also known as Dwayne Booth, is a cartoonist who primarily creates for Truthdig.com and Harpers.com. Mr. Fish's work has also appeared nationally in The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Vanity...

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Editor's note: The U.S. Senate on Thursday confirmed a former oil and mining industry lobbyist as secretary of the interior. President Donald Trump's nomination of David Bernhardt, a government official during the George W. Bush administration, easily survived challenges by environmentally minded senators and others.

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Green Technology Magazine, “is an ‘Insect Apocalypse’ Happening? How Would We Know?” by Brian Lovett, University of Maryland. 

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Green Technology Magazine, “is an ‘Insect Apocalypse’ Happening? How Would We Know?” by Brian Lovett, University of Maryland. 

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Brian Lovett, University of Maryland

Insects scuttle, chew and fly through the world around us. Humans rely on them to pollinate plants, prey on insects that we don't get along with, and to be movers and shakers for Earth's ecosystems. It's hard to imagine a world without insects.

That's why news reports in recent months warning of an " insect apocalypse" sparked widespread alarm. These articles, which were based on long-term insect collections and a review of past studies, suggested that people alive today will witness the indiscriminate extinction of insect-kind.

I study fungi that can be used to control harmful insects, such as pests that damage crops and mosquitoes that transmit malaria. In my world, reports of mass insect die-offs are big news. But while there clearly is reason to be concerned about certain insects, such as the endangered rusty patched bumble bee or the American burying beetle, in my view it isn't yet possible to predict a looming insect apocalypse.

More than 1 million insects have been discovered and named, but many millions have yet to be described. It's undeniable that Earth is becoming increasingly inhospitable to some insects - but nightmarish conditions for one may be heaven to another.

Put another way, there is no perfect environment for all insects. And human impacts on the environment, like climate change and land development, very well may hurt beneficial insects and help harmful ones.

Insect declines

Around the world, entomologists are looking wistfully into empty nets, and car owners are increasingly unsettled by their pristine windshields. It does not take decades of data collection and a degree to notice that in a human lifetime, our teeming world teems less.

The first study to set off alarms was published in 2017 by entomologists in Germany, who reported that over 27 years the biomass of flying insects in their traps had declined by 75%.
Another study from the Luquillo Long Term Ecological Research program site in the Puerto Rican rainforest reproduced an insect survey from the 1970s. It found that the biomass of arthropods - a large group of organisms that includes insects - had declined 10- to 60-fold in that time, and that lizards, frogs and birds that ate arthropods had also declined.

Underscoring this theme, in April 2019 two scholars published a review that synthesized over 70 reports of insect decline from around the world, and predicted mass insect extinctions within a human lifetime. They took a alarmist tone, and have been widely criticized for exaggerating their conclusions and selecting studies to review with the word "decline."

Nonetheless, these researchers had no trouble finding studies to include in their review. Many scientists are currently analyzing the roles that climate change, land use, chemical pesticides and other factors have played in reported declines in many insect species.

The end is not near

These discussions are important, but they don't mean an insect apocalypse is under way. Predicting insect decline is hard to do without a lot of effort and data.

To predict an apocalypse, entomologists worldwide will need to conduct careful large-scale studies that involve collecting, identifying and counting many different insects. There are very few insects for which scientists have enough data now to reliably predict how many individuals there will be from year to year, let alone confidently chart a decline in each species. Most of the insects for which this information exists are species that are important for agricultural or human health, such as managed honey bees or mosquitoes.

And human actions are shifting balances between insect species. As an example, the mosquitoes that are best at spreading pathogens that cause disease have evolved to thrive near us. Entomologists call them anthropophilic, which means they love people.

That love extends to human impacts on the land. Insects that flutter from flower to flower won't be happy when developers bulldoze a meadow and scatter tires around, but human-biting mosquitoes will be buzzing with excitement.

What else is out there?

Entomologists are uniformly concerned about the fate of insects in today's changing world. But I believe the responsible approach is to push back on fire-and-brimstone rhetoric until detailed, large-scale studies are completed. Until then, these same gaps in our knowledge also make it hard to rule out that significant declines in diverse insects are happening. These gaps must be filled to illuminate challenges that insects face, from the inconvenient to the apocalyptic.

When the majority of insects remain to be described, it's hard to value them. But here's one example: Insecticide use in pear groves in China's Sichuan Province has caused such a decline in native pollinators that beekeepers will not lend their bees to these orchards. These farmers are forced to pollinate their trees by hand - an expensive and time-consuming process if you aren't an insect.

Similarly, native natural enemies played invisible roles in slowing the spread of the invasive brown marmorated stink bug when it was introduced into Pennsylvania in the 1990s. They included wasps that lay their eggs inside of stink bug eggs, and predatory insects and spiders that eat stink bugs eggs for breakfast.

Pollination and predation are just the start. Some insects could be sources of new drugs or traditional dyes, while others inspire artists or just provide little moments of inimitable beauty.

With so many unanswered questions, it's clear that there is a need for more funding for biodiversity research. It is no coincidence that recent studies reporting massive insect declines came from a Long-Term Ecological Research center that is publicly funded through the National Science Foundation and from a carefully curated collection made and maintained by entomologists.

This kind of work requires money, bold foresight and dedication to science over long periods of time. But it can produce insights into how our world is changing - and that knowledge will help us prepare for the future.

Brian Lovett, PhD Candidate, University of Maryland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Is an 'insect apocalypse' happening? How would we know? - Green Technology

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Brian Lovett, University of Maryland Insects scuttle, chew and fly through the world around us. Humans rely on them to pollinate plants, prey on insects that we don't get along with, and to be movers and shakers for Earth's ecosystems. It's hard to imagine a world without insects.

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International restrictions on plastic waste expanding – Wealthy nations seek solutions at home, by Kate O’Neill for The Conversation. ND (June 2019)

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International restrictions on plastic waste expanding – Wealthy nations seek solutions at home, by Kate O’Neill for The Conversation. ND (June 2019)

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Less than two years after China banned most imports of scrap material from abroad, many of its neighbors are following suit. On May 28, 2019, Malaysia's environment minister announced that the country was sending 3,000 metric tons of contaminated plastic wastes back to their countries of origin, including the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Along with the Philippines, which is sending 2,400 tons of illegally exported trash back to Canada, Malaysia's stance highlights how controversial the global trade in plastic scrap has become.

Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are all halting flows of plastics that once went to China but were diverted elsewhere after China started refusing it. They are finding support from many nations that are concerned about waste dumping and marine plastic pollution. At a meeting in Geneva in May 2019, 186 countries agreed to dramatically restrict international trade in scrap plastics to prevent plastics dumping.

As I show in my forthcoming book, " Waste," scrap material of all kinds is both a resource and a threat. The new plastics restriction allows less-wealthy countries to exercise their sovereign right not to accept materials they are ill-equipped to handle. This narrows options for wealthy countries that used to send much of their plastic and paper scrap abroad, and is a small but symbolic step toward curbing plastic waste.

A trade with few rules

The Basel Convention, which governs the international waste trade, was adopted in 1989 in response to egregious cases of hazardous waste dumping on communities in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia. Many of its goals remain unfulfilled, including a ban on shipments of hazardous waste from wealthy to less-wealthy nations for final disposal, and a liability protocol that would assign financial responsibility in the event of an incident. And the agreement has largely failed to encompass newer wastes, particularly discarded electronics.

The new provision, proposed by Norway with broad international support, takes a more aggressive approach. It moves plastic scrap from one category - wastes that can be traded unless directly contaminated - to another group of materials that are not deemed hazardous per se, but are subject to the same trade controls as those classified as hazardous. Now these plastics can be shipped overseas for disposal or recycling only with the express consent of the importing country.

The United States signed the treaty in 1989, but never ratified it and is not bound by the treaty's terms. However, Basel Convention member countries cannot accept any restricted waste imports from the United States unless they have reached a bilateral or regional agreement that meets Basel's environmental provisions. The U.S. already has such an agreement with fellow OECD member countries.

Operation National Sword, China's policy restricting imports of post-consumer scrap, was a major driver for updating the treaty. Before the ban China imported nearly half of the world's scrap plastic and paper. Now scrap exporters in wealthy nations are struggling to find alternate markets overseas and boost domestic recycling.

Crisis and opportunity for US recyclers

Trends in the United States illustrate these wrenching shifts. Plastic scrap exports to China plummeted from around 250,000 tons in the spring of 2017 to near zero in the spring of 2019. Overall, U.S. exports of plastic waste to all countries fell from 750,000 tons to 375,000 tons over the same period.

Most U.S. waste and recycling policies are made at the local level, and the past year has been a transformative period. Without ready markets abroad for scrap, recyclers are raising prices, which in turn is leading some municipalities to reduce or eliminate curbside recycling programs. Many plastic products in groups 3-7, the least recyclable types, are being sent to landfills.

More positively, recycling authorities have launched public education campaigns, and investment in recycling infrastructure is on the rise. There is palpable energy at trade meetings around improving options for plastics recycling. Chinese companies are investing in U.S. pulp and paper recycling plants, and may extend into plastics.

Green-leaning states and cities across the nation have passed strict controls on single-use consumer plastics. However, businesses are pushing back, and have persuaded some U.S. states to adopt preemptive measures barring plastic bag bans.

The greatest immediate pressure is on international scrap dealers, who are most immediately affected by the Norway Amendment and vocally opposed it. They are also under stress from the U.S.-China tariff wars, which could make it difficult for them to send even clean, commercially valuable scrap to China.

Waste or scrap?

Under the Norway Amendment, nations can still export plastic scrap if it is clean, uncontaminated and of high quality. The measure effectively distinguishes between waste - which has no value and is potentially harmful - and scrap, or discarded materials that still have value.

This bifurcation matters for the U.S. and other countries that formerly outsourced their recycling to China and are having trouble creating domestic demand for recovered plastics, because it makes a legitimate trade in plastic and other marginal scrap possible. However, there is still no guarantee that this scrap can be reprocessed without harm to workers or the environment once it has reached the importing country.

Nor will the Norway Amendment do much to reduce marine plastic pollution directly. Only a tiny fraction of ocean plastics originate from shipped plastic scrap from rich countries. Most come from items that are used and discarded on land and never enter a recycling system.

Curbing plastic pollution will require broader action, with a focus on coordinating scattered global initiatives and building up relevant international law. Implementing extended producer responsibility for plastics, which could require manufacturers to take plastic products back at their end of life and dispose of them in approved ways, would be a useful step. However, it should not supplant ongoing efforts to reduce production and use of plastics, which contribute to climate change as well as waste.

Solutions may come from the top down in European nations or the bottom up in the United States. But as one Asian country after another shuts the door on scrap exports, it is becoming increasingly clear that business as usual will not solve the plastic pollution challenge.

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As more developing countries reject plastic waste exports, wealthy nations seek solutions at home

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Less than two years after China banned most imports of scrap material from abroad, many of its neighbors are following suit. On May 28, 2019, Malaysia's environment minister announced that the country was sending 3,000 metric tons of contaminated plastic wastes back to their countries of origin, including the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.

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Hashem Al-Ghaili, “The 6th Mass Extinction has begun…” 5 Dec 2018 Video posted to Facebook Page

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Hashem Al-Ghaili, “The 6th Mass Extinction has begun…” 5 Dec 2018 Video posted to Facebook Page

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Saving the Island (Kit) Fox, NPR Morning Addition, 5 Dec 2018: 

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Saving the Island (Kit) Fox, NPR Morning Addition, 5 Dec 2018: 

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NPR broadcast script: Special Series: Getting to Zero Carbon: The Climate Challenge. “How to Push for Renewable Energy is Changing Southwest Georgia. Aired 25 June 2019 Host Mary Louise Kelly. 

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NPR broadcast script: Special Series: Getting to Zero Carbon: The Climate Challenge. “How to Push for Renewable Energy is Changing Southwest Georgia. Aired 25 June 2019 Host Mary Louise Kelly. 

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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

We're going to head out next on a road trip with our colleague Mary Louise Kelly. She's been driving her home state of Georgia top to bottom, reporting on how clean energy is taking hold in a red state. This summer, we're looking at clean energy, climate change and what it's going to take for the U.S. to cut carbon emissions. In Georgia, Mary Louise has found solar energy taking off and changing communities in the process. Today her road trip takes her to Early County in the southwest corner of Georgia.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, BYLINE: Among the first things you notice when you cross into this part of Georgia - plenty of good, flat land, plenty of sun - sometimes, too much.

MIKE NEWBERRY: Golly, we got lucky, y'all. The sun kind of disappeared.

KELLY: The sun has disappeared, hooray.

NEWBERRY: And the wind started blowing. How nice could that be?

KELLY: Mike Newberry, fourth generation here at Hillside farms - the directions he gave us involved no street names. There's a big curve, he told us. And if you hit the Baker County line, you've gone too far. We find him eventually, and Newberry walks me out to one of his fields.

NEWBERRY: This is very typical for Southwest Georgia - a lot of peanuts, a lot of cotton and a lot of corn. But we're looking at a peanut field that's about a month old.

KELLY: The work is hard. This spring was too dry - no rain. This time of year, Newberry gets up at 5 a.m., works till 9 at night. Newberry tells me he loves farming. But at his age, 62, he's thinking of doing something different, maybe even selling some of his land.

NEWBERRY: The right piece of land in the right place - yes.

KELLY: It's been on his mind since developers began showing up a few years ago, interested in land to build solar farms. Now, again, for generations, land around here has supported peanuts, cotton, pine trees - not solar farms. But Newberry, who's also chairman of the county's economic development authority, shoos away a swarm of gnats and tells me he's got one kid - a daughter, who has a job and a life off the farm.

NEWBERRY: And this generation has no tie with the land, so that little heart thing holding it may not be gone. But it's a matter of economics now. And that's true all around us. That's true all around us.

KELLY: A matter of economics - I ask Mike Newberry if his neighbors know much about solar, whether they care where their electricity comes from.

I mean, just to make it personal, do you care where your electricity comes from?

NEWBERRY: I could care less. I want it the cheapest (laughter). I want to pay the cheapest as I can.

KELLY: Drive west for 15 minutes, turning off hot, black, asphalt roads onto dirt, and a solar farm is going up fast.

(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINERY RUNNING)

KELLY: Row after row of steel posts sprout from red Georgia clay. They will be fitted with frames to support the solar panels.

NICK DE VRIES: These are articulated single-axis trackers.

KELLY: Nick de Vries, showing me how the panels will swivel as the day unfolds. De Vries is vice president of technology for silicon ranch. It's a developer out of Nashville that is building solar power plants all over the country. This one is on track to be up and running by the end of the year - 355,000 solar panels blanketing this land as far as you can see.

DE VRIES: This is one of the beauties of solar power plants. We know our production rates. We know what it takes to build. You can build a large power plant construction within a year.

KELLY: De Vries says as the solar industry's matured and costs have fallen, renewable energy can actually be cheaper than traditional.

DE VRIES: We are now able to deliver energy at very competitive prices.

KELLY: So here's how it's all coming together. Right now here in Georgia, the solar panels we see going up here were assembled and shipped from a brand-new Korean-owned factory in Dalton, Ga., up north - opposite corner of the state. And the power that those panels generate will supply a new data center east of Atlanta for Facebook. That is also under construction and committed to 100% renewable energy.

So much change so fast - mixed feelings about it?

STEVE SINGLETARY: Yeah, big time. I hate to see it go, but things change. It was a golden opportunity, so we took advantage of it.

KELLY: This is Steve Singletary. It was his family's land that Silicon Ranch bought for the solar farm - land they'd owned for nearly nine decades. Singletary tells me he cares about the environment, but the decision to sell to a solar company - it wasn't about the environment. It was about money.

Would you have sold that land to a nuclear facility?

SINGLETARY: Probably.

KELLY: Coal?

SINGLETARY: Probably.

KELLY: Singletary's sitting, by the way, with me and his friend June Merritt. She runs this county. She is chair of the Early County Commission, which has been agreeable to all the solar projects, especially this one.

JUNE MERRITT: There's no downside. I don't know how it could be. We don't have pollution. We don't have smell. There's just nothing. They're just there.

KELLY: We've met up in an old theater, where the county commission now meets in Blakely, the county seat.

What's it bringing to you? I mean, why is this good for Early County?

MERRITT: It's good for Early County for money. I would say over the next 25 years, there will be about $8 million that will come into Early County in the form of taxes. And that will be a tremendous relief.

KELLY: Merritt says 5 million of that will go to county schools. And there's another way Silicon Ranch is engaging with the community here, which brings us to the last stop on our road trip. It involves cows.

All right, Will Harris, tell us where you're taking us this morning. Why are we driving?

WILL HARRIS: So we're just leaving our general store, heading for one of the paddocks, where our big herd is grazing.

KELLY: I'll let you picture him - cowboy hat, gray beard, suspenders holding up his jeans. He's driving. His gun is in a holster dangling from the back of the passenger seat - my seat - as we bounce along.

HARRIS: (Unintelligible) a disservice.

KELLY: Will Harris is fourth generation here at White Oak Pastures. His family's been on this land since 1866. When he found out what Silicon Ranch was doing next door, he came up with a big idea, which is maybe you can have it both ways. Maybe you can have a solar farm and keep the land for agriculture. I'll explain, but hang on. The cows are coming.

HARRIS: If you're going to record, you need to get out.

KELLY: OK. Just watching a couple thousand head of cattle move through a big, green, metal gate. They're moving from one paddock to another - watching a cowboy drive them through.

(SOUNDBITE OF COW MOOING)

KELLY: What Will Harris is doing on his farm is called regenerative land management. Put simply, he's trying to restore cycles of nature broken by humans and chemicals and over-farming. Harris rotates different animals through his pastures. First, the cattle - let them eat and poop. There's rich nutrients in there. Then move them on. Bring in sheep or other animals to eat what the cows didn't eat. Let the land recover, and repeat. Now, imagine this same scenario - a couple thousand cows chewing on knee-high grass on a solar farm. That is what Will Harris and Silicon Ranch are working out how to do here in Southwest Georgia.

HARRIS: What you don't want to do is let this brand-new grass bud out and bite it off, bud out and bite it off.

DE VRIES: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

HARRIS: We call it eat it to death...

DE VRIES: Yeah.

HARRIS: ...Literally.

(SOUNDBITE OF COWS MOOING)

KELLY: Harris explains to Nick de Vries that this kind of grazing will help prevent erosion under the solar panels. And long term, as the soil revitalizes, he thinks it could draw carbon out of the atmosphere, as he's proven on his own land. Outside experts have studied Harris' farm and found his soil could be capturing as much carbon as his cows are emitting.

(SOUNDBITE OF COWS MOOING)

KELLY: So that is one thread of the solar story being written today in Georgia, a red state, where people are trying to figure out, in a state with a lot of land and a lot of sun, just how far solar can go.

HARRIS: All right. Thank you all for going with me.

KELLY: Thank you for driving.

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